Jerzy Jurka

Jerzy Władysław Jurka
Jerzy Jurka, Asilomar Conference on Transposable Elements.jpg
Born(1950-06-04)4 June 1950
Died19 July 2014(2014-07-19) (aged 64)
NationalityAmerican
Alma materJagiellonian University (M.Sc. Chemistry)
University of Warsaw (D.Sc. Molecular Biology)
Harvard University (Post-doc)
Known forContributions to understanding of transposable elements
Spouse(s)Dr. Elzbieta Jurka
ChildrenMichael Jurka
Matthew Jurka
Timothy Jurka
Scientific career
FieldsChemistry
Molecular Biology

Jerzy Władysław Jurka (June 4, 1950 – July 19, 2014) was a Polish-American computational and molecular biologist. He served as the assistant director of research at the Linus Pauling Institute prior to founding the Genetic Information Research Institute. He collaborated with several notable scientists including Linus Pauling, George Irving Bell, Roy Britten, Temple Smith, and Emile Zuckerkandl. His Erdős number is 3, using the path through Temple Smith and Stanislaw Ulam.

Research

Dr. Jurka is best known for his work on eukaryotic transposable elements (TEs), including the discovery of the major families of Alu elements. He also proposed the mechanism of Alu proliferation and discovered their paternal transmission. The majority of known types of class II TEs, or DNA transposons, were discovered or co-discovered by his team at the Genetic Information Research Institute, based on DNA sequence analysis. The first one, reported in 2001 with Vladimir Kapitonov, became known as Helitron, which is playing a major role in genomic evolution. In 2006 they reported a study of a new, self-synthesizing transposable element called Polinton or Maverick, which is present many diverse eukaryotes. More recently, Jurka and his co-workers presented a hypothesis that links the origin of repetitive families (TE families), to population subdivision and speciation based on classical concepts of population genetics.

Jerzy Jurka is the founder of Repbase [1], which he developed since 1990 with his team and other contributors. Repbase is the primary reference database of TEs used in DNA annotation and analysis.



This page was last updated at 2021-12-04 10:53 UTC. Update now. View original page.

All our content comes from Wikipedia and under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.


Top

If mathematical, chemical, physical and other formulas are not displayed correctly on this page, please useFirefox or Safari