SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 6 - 8 may 2009
New Fellows Seminar
Thursday, 7 May 2009
Professor Peter Waterhouse FAA
ARC Federation Fellow, School of Biological Sciences, University of Sydney
Peter Waterhouse took up an ARC Federation Fellowship in 2008, primarily at the University of Sydney in the School of Molecular and Microbial Bioscience. He joined CSIRO Plant Industry directly after obtaining his PhD from Dundee University (Scotland) in 1982 and remained there until 2008, except for a sabbatical year at the Medical Research Council and the University of Cambridge, UK. His early research was on the evolution, genome organisation and gene regulation of plant viruses. More recently, his research has been towards understanding and using small RNA-mediated processes in gene regulation, virus defence and epigenetic modifications. He has received a number of awards including the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science (2007), the Bulletin’s Top 10 Smartest Scientists (2007), and the 2005 CSIRO Chairman’s Medal.
Gene silencing
As early as the 1920s it was known that plants could be protected against a severe virus by prior infection with a related but mild strain of the virus. The mechanism providing this 'vaccination-like' protection remained largely unknown until my research group and others, over the last decade, have discovered that there is a specific degradation process that can be triggered and directed in cells by small fragments of double-stranded RNA. This discovery has led to an extremely powerful technology for the destruction of specific viruses or messenger RNAs, and hence the silencing of any gene, within a cell. The specificity of the destruction is simply governed by the sequence of the double stranded RNA introduced into the cell. In this talk, I will describe how the process works, how it can be exploited, how it plays a number of key roles in regulating the growth and development of almost all eukaryotes ranging from fungi to humans, and finally I will show some of the amazing properties of the mechanism that we are yet to fully understand.
