Biography
Also Viewed
The basics
Quick Facts
| Gender |
|
The details
Biography
Robin Campbell Allshire (born 19 May 1960) FRSE (2005 Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh), FRS (2011 Fellow of the Royal Society, London), is Professor of Chromosome Biology at University of Edinburgh and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow. His research group at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology focuses on the epigenetic mechanisms governing the assembly of specialised domains of chromatin and their transmission through cell division.
Early life and education
Robin Allshire grew up in the fishing village of Howth, Co Dublin 1960-1978. His parents were Arthur Gordon Allshire (1925-2012) who was a Pharmacist and Freda Margaret (née Schmutz; 1933-2014). He was awarded his B.A. (Genetics) by Trinity College, University of Dublin, in 1981 where he was motivated by the inspirational teaching of David McConnell and colleagues at the Dept of Genetics to undertake post-graduate studies. He subsequently joined the MRC Mammalian Genome Unit, University of Edinburgh where he obtained his PhD in 1985 under the guidance of Chris Bostock and Ed Southern investigating the use of Bovine Papilloma Virus as a chassis for mammalian artificial chromosome construction
Career
In 1985 Allshire joined Nick Hastie's research group at the MRC Human Genetics Unit, Edinburgh (formerly MRC Clinical and Population Cytogentics Unit) as a postdoctoral researcher where he discovered that mammalian telomeres are composed of simple repetitive sequences similar to those of unicellular eukaryotes and that telomere length in blood cells shorten with age and are further eroded in cancerous cells. This work resulted from following the fate of fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe) telomeres after introdroducing fission yeast chromosomes into mouse cell in collaoration with Peter Fantes. In 1989 he took a position as an independent visiting scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories for 18 months before joining the MRC Human Genetics Unit as a junior group leader. While at CSHL he decided to switch his focus to investigating chromosomal elements in the genetically tractable fission yeast. At the MRC HGU, Edinburgh (1990 - 2002), and subsequently at the Wellome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh (2002–present), he discovered that genes are silenced when placed within fission yeast centromeres and telomeres, and then utilised this gene silencing to gain fundamental insights into the processes of chromosome segregation, and heterochromatin and kinetochore CENP-A chromatin establishment and maintenance. He is particularly interested in the epigenetic mechanisms that allow the persistence of specialised chromatin domains through multiple cell divisions and meiosis. He has investigated how RNA interference (RNAi) mediates heterochromatin formation and shown that splicing fators contribute to heterochromatin integrity via siRNA generation and RNAi. He has provided insight into how transcription and resulting non-coding RNA might influence the assembly of specialised CENP-A chromatin and recently demonstrated that some fission yeast lncRNA regulate neighbouring genes by transcriptional interference