Laurence Hurst

Laurence Hurst
Laurence Hurst in 2015, portrait via the Royal Society
Born Laurence Daniel Hurst
(1965-01-06) 6 January 1965[1]
Ilkley, Yorkshire[1]
Education Truro School
Alma mater
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Thesis Intra-genomic conflict and evolution (1991)
Doctoral advisor
Doctoral students Gilean McVean[10][11]
Website go.bath.ac.uk/ldhurst

Laurence Daniel Hurst (born 1965)[1] FMedSci FRS[5] is a Professor of Evolutionary Genetics in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Bath and the director of the Milner Centre for Evolution.[12][13]

Education

Hurst was educated at Truro School[1] and completed his Bachelor of Arts in Natural Sciences (Zoology) at Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1987.[14] After a year at Harvard University he returned to the UK, and was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford in 1991[9] for research supervised by W. D. Hamilton and Alan Grafen.[9]

Career and Research

Hurst was a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge from 1993 to 1996 and has been a Professor at the University of Bath since 1997.[1]

His research interests[6] include evolution, genetics and genomics using computational and mathematical techniques to understand the way genes and genomes evolve. This has resulted in work on housekeeping genes,[15] gene orders,[16][17] and the evolution of drug resistance in Staphylococcus aureus,[18] Saccharomyces cerevisiae[19][20][21] and the evolution of sexual reproduction / sexual dimorphism.[22]

Hurst works on fundamental problems in the evolution of genetic systems, such as understanding why some sorts of mutations are less damaging than predicted whilst others are more damaging. Mutations that change proteins are, surprisingly, often not especially deleterious. Hurst showed that this was because the genetic code is structured in a way that renders it highly error-proof. Similarly, in applying network representations of gene interactions, he revealed why many deletions of genes have little effect and which deletions tend not to be recessive.[5]

By contrast, Hurst revealed that genomic changes often considered to be relatively harmless – such as gene order changes and mutations at 'silent' sites – are under selection for unanticipated reasons. He also showed how synonymous mutations can disrupt the way gene transcripts are processed. Similarly, in showing that genomes are arranged into gene expression domains, Hurst revealed that genes can affect the expression of other genes in their vicinity. As of 2015 translation of this fundamental work to medicine is a focus of his research.[5]

Awards and honours

Hurst was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015.[5] His certificate of election to the Royal Society reads:

Hurst was awarded the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London in 2003,[2] and elected a member of European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2004.[3] He was awarded The Genetics Society Medal in 2010.[4]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 HURST, Prof. Laurence Daniel. ukwhoswho.com. Who's Who. 2016 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription required)
  2. 1 2 "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 September 2012. Retrieved 15 June 2011. Zoological Society of London Scientific Medal Winners
  3. 1 2 http://people.embo.org/profile/laurence-hurst
  4. 1 2 http://www.genetics.org.uk/page/2775/2010-Genetics-Society-Medal.html 2010 Genetics Society Medal Archived 15 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 "Professor Laurence Hurst FMedSci FRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-11-17. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
    "All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." --"Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 2015-09-25. Retrieved 2016-03-09.
  6. 1 2 Laurence Hurst publications indexed by Google Scholar
  7. ↑ Hurst, L.; Hamilton, W.; Ladle, R. (1992). "Covert sex". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 7 (5): 144–145. doi:10.1016/0169-5347(92)90205-P. PMID 21235987.
  8. ↑ Hurst, L.; Grafen, A. (1990). "Sex and flagellation". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 5 (12): 419–422. doi:10.1016/0169-5347(90)90029-D. PMID 21232406.
  9. 1 2 3 Hurst, Laurence Daniel (1991). Intra-genomic conflict and evolution (PhD thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 556449138.
  10. ↑ McVean, Gilean Alistair Tristram (1998). Adaptation and conflict: the differences between the sexes in mammalian genome evolution (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge.
  11. ↑ "Students and post-docs past and present in the Hurst laboratory". University of Bath. Archived from the original on 2015-05-15.
  12. ↑ http://www.bath.ac.uk/bio-sci/research/profiles/hurst-l.html Laurence Hurst at the University of Bath Archived 18 September 2009 at the Wayback Machine.
  13. ↑ http://people.bath.ac.uk/bssldh/LaurenceDHurst/Home.html Hurst Laboratory of Evolutionary Genetics and Genomics
  14. ↑ "Laurence Hurst CV". Archived from the original on 2012-03-21.
  15. ↑ Lercher, M.J.; Urrutia, A.O.; Hurst, L.D. (2002). "Clustering of housekeeping genes provides a unified model of gene order in the human genome". Nature Genetics. 31 (2): 180–183. doi:10.1038/ng887. PMID 11992122.
  16. ↑ Hurst, L.D.; Pál, C.; Lercher, M.J. (2004). "The evolutionary dynamics of eukaryotic gene order". Nature Reviews Genetics. 5 (4): 299–310. doi:10.1038/nrg1319. PMID 15131653.
  17. ↑ Weber, Claudia C; Hurst, Laurence D (2011). "Support for multiple classes of local expression clusters in Drosophila melanogaster, but no evidence for gene order conservation". Genome Biology. 12 (3): R23. doi:10.1186/gb-2011-12-3-r23. ISSN 1465-6906. PMC 3129673. PMID 21414197.
  18. ↑ Holden, M. T. G.; Feil, E.; Lindsay, J.; Peacock, S.; Day, N.; Enright, M.; Foster, T.; Moore, C.; Hurst, L.; Atkin, R.; Barron, A.; Bason, N.; Bentley, S. D.; Chillingworth, C.; Chillingworth, T.; Churcher, C.; Clark, L.; Corton, C.; Cronin, A.; Doggett, J.; Dowd, L.; Feltwell, T.; Hance, Z.; Harris, B.; Hauser, H.; Holroyd, S.; Jagels, K.; James, K. D.; Lennard, N.; Line, A. (2004). "Complete genomes of two clinical Staphylococcus aureus strains: Evidence for the rapid evolution of virulence and drug resistance". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 101 (26): 9786–9791. doi:10.1073/pnas.0402521101. PMC 470752. PMID 15213324.
  19. ↑ Papp, Balázs; Pál, Csaba; Hurst, Laurence D. (2003). "Dosage sensitivity and the evolution of gene families in yeast". Nature. 424 (6945): 194–197. doi:10.1038/nature01771. ISSN 0028-0836. PMID 12853957.
  20. ↑ Pál, C.; Papp, B.; Hurst, L. (2001). "Highly expressed genes in yeast evolve slowly". Genetics. 158 (2): 927–931. PMC 1461684. PMID 11430355.
  21. ↑ Weber, C. C.; Hurst, L. D. (2009). "Protein Rates of Evolution Are Predicted by Double-Strand Break Events, Independent of Crossing-over Rates". Genome Biology and Evolution. 1: 340–349. doi:10.1093/gbe/evp033. PMC 2817428. PMID 20333203.
  22. ↑ Hurst, Laurence D.; Peck, Joel R. (1996). "Recent advances in understanding of the evolution and maintenance of sex". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 11 (2): 46–52. doi:10.1016/0169-5347(96)81041-X. ISSN 0169-5347. PMID 21237760.
  23. ↑ "Certificate of election: EC/2015/24". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 20 December 2015.
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