SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 6 - 8 may 2009

New Fellows Seminar

Thursday, 7 May 2009

Professor Andy Choo FAA
Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, Royal Children's Hospital

Andy Choo is director of the Laboratory and Community Genetics Theme at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute and head of the Chromosome Research Program at the Institute. He did his PhD at the Department of Genetics at the University of Melbourne, followed by training at Oxford University and University of California in San Francisco, before starting his own group in Melbourne. He has published over 170 articles and is a senior principal research fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. He is a leader in the chromosome field and is renowned for his discovery that centromeres can be repositioned to different locations within the genome. This discovery has revolutionised our understanding of centromere plasticity, chromosome evolution and speciation, and the formation of a certain type of common cancer.

Ensuring the proper inheritance of our genetic wealth

During our lifetime, our body undergoes 1016 (or 10,000 trillion) cell divisions. Each time the cells divide, a new copy of our genetic material is replicated and divided between the daughter cells. Failure to distribute the replicated genetic material precisely and equally will lead to all kinds of clinical problems such as Down syndrome, pregnancy loss, mental retardation and cancer. It is therefore understandable that the cells have evolved highly sophisticated mechanisms to ensure the accurate distribution of our genetic material whenever our cells divide. A crucial component of these mechanisms is the centromere which allows replicated DNA (chromosomes) to bind to molecular fibres that then pull the replicated DNA apart to the daughter cells. Against a long-held dogma, our work discovered that the position of the centromere can be shifted to many different locations within the genome – an occurrence that is probably as unimaginable as suggesting that we can relocate our heart to every other part of our body. This discovery has provided a major conceptual framework for our understanding of how the centromere works, how new species of plants and animals arise, and how a certain type of common cancer is caused.