个人简介

Ph.D., Organic Chemistry, University of Sheffield, England B.Sc., Chemistry, University of Sheffield, England

研究领域

Restriction endonucleases, DNA methylases, computational molecular biology

Dr. Richard J. Roberts is the Chief Scientific Officer at New England Biolabs. He was educated in England, attending St. Stephen’s School and the City of Bath Boys’ School in Bath before moving to the University of Sheffield where he obtained a B.Sc. in Chemistry in 1965 and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry in 1968. His postdoctoral research was carried out in Professor J.L. Strominger’s laboratory at Harvard, where he studied the tRNAs that are involved in the biosynthesis of bacterial cell walls. From 1972 to 1992, he worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, reaching the position of Assistant Director for Research under Dr. J.D. Watson. He began work on the newly discovered Type II restriction enzymes in 1972 and in the next few years more than 100 such enzymes were discovered and characterized in Dr. Roberts’ laboratory. His laboratory has cloned the genes for several restriction enzymes and their cognate methylases and studies of these enzymes has been a major research theme. Dr. Roberts has also been involved in studies of Adenovirus-2 beginning with studies of transcription that led to the discovery of split genes and mRNA splicing in 1977. This was followed by efforts to deduce the DNA sequence of the Adenovirus-2 genome and a complete sequence of 35,937 nucleotides was obtained.This latter project required the extensive use of computer methods, both for the assembly of the sequence and its subsequent analysis. His laboratory pioneered the application of computers in this area and the further development of computer methods of protein and nucleic acid sequence analysis continues to be a major research focus. The field of DNA methyltransferases is also an area of active research interest and crystal structures for the HhaI methyltransferase both alone and in complex with DNA have been obtained in collaboration with Dr. X. Cheng. The latter complex is quite remarkable as the protein causes the target cytosine base to flip completely out of the helix so that it is accessible for chemical reaction. This extreme, but elegant, distortion of the double helix had not been seen previously. A major interest at present is the semi-automatic identification of restriction enzyme and methylase genes within the GenBank database and the development of rapid methods to assay function. Already several new specificities have been found and it is clear that there are many more restriction enzyme genes in Nature than had been previously suspected. Most recently, he is one of the leaders of the COMBREX project that is concerned with the functional annotation of prokaryotic genomes.

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Colizzi, V., de Oliveira, T., Roberts, R.J. (2007) Libya should stop denying scientific evidence on HIV. Nature 448: 992. Roberts, R.J. (2007) Message to the Congress of Richard J. Roberts, In: Proceedings of the World Congress for Freedom of Scientific Research, Rome, February 16-18, 2006, p. 28. Roberts, R.J. (2008) Restriction enzymes at NEB: Over 30 years of innovation. NEB Expressions 2.4: 1-3. Roberts, R.J. (2008) Foreword to Health and Sports in Africa. A challenge for development. (F.-X. Mbopi-Keou, Ed.). John Libbey Eurotext, Montrouge, France. Lenz, T., Poot, P., Anton, B.P., Hueben, M., Dalhoff, C., Baessler, O., Glinski, M., Roberts, R.J., Weinhold, E., Dreger, M., Koester, H. (2009) Proteomic Forum 2009 Freie Universitat Berlin (oral presentation). Roberts, R.J. (2009) Protect our access to medical research. The Boston Globe. March 23, 2009. Collins, J.J., Endy, D., Hutchison, C.A. III, Roberts, R.J. (2010) Editorial – Synthetic Biology. Nucl. Acids Res. 38: 2513. Lunnen, K., O’Driscoll, J., Heiter, D., Roberts, R., Wilson, G. (2010) Unusual new restrictionmodification systems. 6th New England Biolabs Meeting on Restriction/Modification, Jacobs University, Bremen, August 1-6, 2010. Letter to the Editor of The Times from Donald W. Braben and others (2010). Fomenkov, A., Benner, J., Chan, S.-H., Roberts, R.J., Morgan, R.D. (2011) DrdVI: a new ATP-dependent, multi-subunit restriction-modification system that uses a split methyltransferase for host protection. Abstract for the Nankai meeting. Chang, Y.-C., Hu, Z., Rachlin, J.N., Anton, B.P., Pokrzywa, R., Choi, H.-P., Faller, L.L.,Guleria, J., Housman, G., Klitgord, N., Mazumdar, V., McGettrick, M.G., Osmani, L., Swaminathan,R., Tao, K., Letovsky, S., Vitkuip, D., Sergre, D., Salzberg, S.L., Celisi, C., Steffen, M., Roberts, R.J.,Kasif, S. (2011) COMBREX: Accelerating the functional annotation of prokaryotic genomes.Abstract for the IWBSB (International Workshop on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology), Berlin. Anton, B.P., Clark, T.A., Boitano, M., Korlach, J., Roberts, R.J. (2012) Determination of DNA Methyltransferase Specificity by Single Molecule Real Time (SMRT) Sequencing. Poster, 19th Annual Internal Meeting on Microbial Genomics, Lake Arrowhead, CA. September 16-29, 2012. Huete-Perez, J.A., Roberts, R.J., Quezada, F. (2012) Marine genome resource sustainability in Central America. Electronic Journal of Biotechnology, submitted. Colwell, R., Avery, S., Berger, J., Davis, G.E., Hamilton, H., Lovejoy, T., Malcom., S.,McMullen, A., Novacek, M., Roberts, R.J., Tapia, R., Machlis, G. (2012) Revisiting Leopold: Resource Stewardship in the National Parks. A Report of the National Park System Advisory Board Science Committee. Harhay, G.P., McVey, D.S., Korlach, J., Roberts, R., Anton, B.P., Chitko-McKown, C.G.,Clawson, M.L., Heaton, M.P., Harhay, D., Smith, T.P.L. (2012) Application of SMRT genome sequencing to reveal the methylomes of bacteria associated with respiratory disease outbreaks in beef cattle. (Abstract) Roberts, R. (2012) Nucleic Acids Research and Open Access. Roberts, R.J. (2012) TOPIC: Arsenic-based Life. Complete technical description in TWENTY-FOUR (24) SECONDS. Annals of Improbable Research 18: 20-21. Golomb, B.A., Brenner, S., Chalfie, M., Glashow, S.L., Glauber, R.J., Hubel, D.H., Maskin, E.S., Greengard, P., Gross, D.J., Roberts, R., Tonegawa, S., Wilczek, F.A., Brown, E.M., Sejnowski,T.J. (2013) Chocolate habits of Nobel prizewinners. Nature 499: 409. Roberts, R.J. (2010) Statement before the Subcommittee on Information Policy, the Census and National Archives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform regarding public access to publicly funded research. Allard, M.W., Pirone, C., Muruvanda, T., Hoffman, M., Soler-Garcia, A.A., Wang, C., Strain,E., Timme, R., Payne, J., Luo, Y., Keys, C.E., Cooper, T., Chin, C.-S., Korlach, J., Musser, S.M.,Zhao, S., Stones, R., Roberts, R.J., Evans, P., Brown, E.W. (2013) Poster for ASM Salmonella Conference.