David P. Bartel is an American molecular biologist best known for his work on

microRNA MicroRNA (miRNA) are small, single-stranded, non-coding RNA molecules containing 21 to 23 nucleotides. Found in plants, animals and some viruses, miRNAs are involved in RNA silencing and post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. mi ...

s. Bartel is a

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors ...

Biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

, Member of the

Whitehead Institute Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is a non-profit research institute located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States that is dedicated to improving human health through basic biomedical research. It was founded as a fiscally indepen ...

, and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

Biography

Bartel earned his

B.A. Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four yea ...

degree in

from

Goshen College Goshen College is a private Mennonite liberal arts college in Goshen, Indiana. It was founded in 1894 as the Elkhart Institute of Science, Industry and the Arts, and is affiliated with Mennonite Church USA. The college is accredited by the High ...

in 1982 and his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

degree in

Virology Virology is the scientific study of biological viruses. It is a subfield of microbiology that focuses on their detection, structure, classification and evolution, their methods of infection and exploitation of host cells for reproduction, th ...

from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

in 1993, under the mentorship of

Jack W. Szostak Jack William Szostak (born November 9, 1952) is a Canadian American biologist of Polish British descent, Nobel Prize laureate, university professor at the University of Chicago, former Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Alexan ...

. While in the Szostak lab, Bartel isolated the first ribozymes directly from random sequence, using ''in vitro'' evolution (among these, the Class I ligase). After he became independent at the Whitehead Institute, he further evolved this ribozyme to function as a RNA-dependent RNA polymerase to extend primers on external RNA templates, bolstering the "RNA world" theory. Bartel later shifted his research focus towards microRNA biology and in particular on understanding their regulatory functions. MicroRNAs are short pieces of RNA, about 22 nucleotides long, that dampen gene expression through the silencing of messenger RNAs (mRNAs). His lab was one of three that found that animals have many of these small regulatory RNAs, and he was the first to describe microRNAs in plants. Through his work with microRNAs, he developed a methodology that predicts their regulatory targets and created the web-based tool TargetScan, which makes these predictions available to the research community."Genome Res." 2009 Jan;19(1):92-105.
Most mammalian mRNAs are conserved targets of microRNAs
" Friedman RC1, Farh KK, Burge CB, Bartel DP. His research has also shown that most human mRNAs are regulated by microRNAs and that microRNAs predominantly act to decrease the levels of their mRNA targets. Bartel also discovered several other types of regulatory RNAs, including heterochromatic siRNAs, which silence DNA instead of RNA. In addition, Bartel is investigating the roles of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and how the untranslated regions and tails of mRNAs recruit and mediate regulatory phenomena. Bartel is a founder and a scientific advisor of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, a company started in 2002 to advance “RNAi (RNA interference) therapeutics as a new class of innovative medicines”. In 2006, Bartel was placed second by Thomson Reuters in a 'citations' ranking in the field of Molecular Biology/Genetics. He has received several awards and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.

References

External links

His Howard Hughes Medical Institute bioBartel Lab websiteTargetScanDavid Bartel Seminar: microRNAs
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bartel, David Living people American biochemists Howard Hughes Medical Investigators Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences alumni Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Whitehead Institute faculty Year of birth missing (living people)