Walter Gilbert

GILBERT, WALTER

gilbert@nucleus.harvard.edu

Affiliation : Carl M. Loeb University Professor,
Walter Gilbert Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA.

Research Interests :
He helped formulate a method for determining the sequence of bases in nucleic acids (RNA and DNA) that made it possible to manufacture genetic material in the laboratory. For his role in this work, he shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Frederick Sanger and Paul Berg.

Dr Gilbert and his group are interested in the evolution of the intron/exon structure of genes. Are the introns ancient structures, used to assemble the first genes four billion years ago? Or are they more recent acquisitions, used for exon shuffling in recently evolved proteins ? Their work ranges from theoretical estimates for the size of the universe of exons to theoretical arguments that the introns are very old and that exons are related to folding subunits of proteins. They are studying the assembling of protein shapes from modular substructures.

Awards :
1979 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research " For his brilliant development of a new technique for the rapid sequencing of DNA ".
1980 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, with Frederick Sanger and Paul Berg, " for contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids ".

Selected Publications :
Long, M., S.J. de Souza, C. Rosenberg and W. Gilbert (1998). Relationship between "proto-splice sites" and intron phases: Evidence from dicodon analysis. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA 95, 219-223.

de Souza, S.J., M. Long, R.J. Klein, S. Roy, S. Lin and W. Gilbert (1998). Toward a resolution of the introns early/late debate: Only phase zero introns are correlated with the structure of ancient proteins. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA 95, 5094-5099.

Gilbert, W. and S.J. de Souza (1999). Introns and the RNA World, In "The RNA World, Second Edition", Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 221-231.

Roy, S.W., M. Nosaka, S.J. de Souza and W. Gilbert (1999). Centripetal modules and ancient introns. Gene 238, 85-91.

Saxonov, S., I. Daizadeh, A. Fedorov and W. Gilbert (2000). EID: The exon-intron database-an exhaustive database of protein-coding intron-containing genes. Nucl. Acids Res. 28(1), 185-190.

Roy, S.W., B.P. Lewis, A. Fedorov and W. Gilbert (2001). Footprints of primordial introns on the eukaryotic genome. TIG 17(9), 496-499.

Fedorov, A., X. Cao, S. Saxonov, S.J. de Souza, S.W. Roy and W. Gilbert (2001). Intron distribution difference for 276 ancient and 131 modern genes suggests the existence of ancient introns,. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 98, 13177-13182.

Fedorov, A., S. Saxonov and W. Gilbert (2002). Regularities of context-dependent codon bias in eukaryotic genes,. Nucl. Acids Res. 30(5).

Endo, T., A. Fedorov, S.J. de Souza and W. Gilbert (2002). Do introns favor or avoid regions of amino-acid conservation? Mol. Biol. Evol 19(4), 521-525.