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Notes for Wikipedia Fellows peer reviewer: Took "Research and Career" section of Susan Lindquist and broke it into Career and Research sections. Mainly edited Career section for now. Some references are broken from copying over.

Career[edit]

Upon completing her dissertation in 1976, Lindquist moved to the University of Chicago for a short post-doc before being hired as a faculty member in the Biology Department in 1978,[1] becoming the Albert D. Lasker Professor of Medical Sciences with the founding of the Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology in 1980.[2] At the University of Chicago Lindquist investigated the role of heat shock proteins in regulating the cellular response to environmental stresses. Lindquist pioneered the use of yeast as a model system to study how heat shock proteins regulate gene expression and protein folding. For this work, Lindquist was made an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1988.[1] After making important new discoveries to prions, Lindquist moved to MIT in 2001 and was appointed as Director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, one of the first women in the nation to lead a major independent research organization.[3] In 2004, Lindquist resumed research as an Institute Member, an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and an associate member of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.[4]

TO MOVE: Lindquist was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2009 (presented in 2010), for research contributions to protein folding.[5]

Lindquist also co-founded two companies to translate research into potential therapies, FoldRx in and Yumanity Therapeutics in, companies developing drug therapies for diseases of protein misfolding and amyloidosis.[6][7]

In November 2016, Johnson & Johnson gave a $5 million gift to the Whitehead Institute to establish the Susan Lindquist Chair for Women in Science in Lindquist’s memory. The gift will be awarded to a female scientist at the Whitehead Institute.[8]

OLD SENTENCE: Lindquist served as a Professor at the University of Chicago for 23 years and then at MIT, where she taught concurrent with her Whitehead Institute appointment since 2001, and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.[9]


Research[edit]

Lindquist is best known for her research that provided strong evidence for a new paradigm in genetics based upon the inheritance of proteins with new, self-perpetuating shapes rather than new DNA sequences. This research provided a biochemical framework for understanding devastating neurological illnesses such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, and Creutzfeldt–Jakob diseases.[10] She was considered an expert in protein folding, which, as explained by Lindquist in the following excerpt, is an ancient, fundamental problem in biology:

"What do "mad cows", people with neurodegenerative diseases, and an unusual type of inheritance in yeast have in common? They are all experiencing the consequences of misfolded proteins. ... In humans the consequences can be deadly, leading to such devastating illnesses as Alzheimer's Disease. In one case, the misfolded protein is not only deadly to the unfortunate individual in which it has appeared, but it can apparently be passed from one individual to another under special circumstances - producing infectious neurodegenerative diseases such as mad-cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeld–Jacob Disease in humans."[11]

Lindquist worked on the PSI+ element in yeast (a prion) and how it can act as a switch that hides or reveals numerous mutations throughout the genome, thus acting as an evolutionary capacitor. She proposed that a heat shock protein, hsp90, may act in the same way, normally preventing phenotypic consequences of genetic changes, but showing all changes at once when the HSP system is overloaded, either pharmacologically or under stressful environmental conditions.[12]

Susan Lindquist

Most of these variations are likely to be harmful, but a few unusual combinations may produce valuable new traits, spurring the pace of evolution.[citation needed] Cancer cells too have an extraordinary ability to evolve. Lindquist's lab investigates closely related evolutionary mechanisms involved in the progression of cancerous tumors[13] and in the evolution of antibiotic-resistant fungi.[14]

Lindquist made advances in nanotechnology, researching organic amyloid fibers capable of self-organizing into structures smaller than manufactured materials. Her group also developed a yeast “living test tube” model to study protein folding transitions in neurodegenerative diseases and to test therapeutic strategies through high-throughput screening.[15]

Lindquist lectured nationally and internationally on a variety of scientific topics. In June 2006, she was the inaugural guest on the "Futures in Biotech" podcast on Leo Laporte's TWiT network.[16] In 2007, she participated in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland with other MIT leaders.[17]

Lindquist went on to show that misfolding proteins called prions, which had been known to aggregate in several neurodegenerative diseases, used by cells to burst of novel phenotypes. This provided crucial evidence that proteins heritable traits.

  1. ^ a b Fuchs, Elaine (December 2016). "Susan Lee Lindquist (1949–2016)". Cell. 167 (6): 1440–1442. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2016.11.030. ISSN 0092-8674. S2CID 31947617.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference :5 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ "Susan Lindquist, PhD". HHMI.org. Retrieved 2016-10-30.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference :4 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ "The President's National Medal of Science: Recipient Details | NSF - National Science Foundation". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved 2018-08-07.
  6. ^ "Scientific Founders - FoldRx". Archived from the original on 2011-07-11. Retrieved 2016-10-31.
  7. ^ "Yumanity Therapeutics". www.yumanity.com. Retrieved 2017-07-02.
  8. ^ WEISMAN, ROBERT (17 November 2016). "A chair at MIT in Lindquist's memory". Boston Globe. Retrieved 21 September 2017.
  9. ^ "Susan Lindquist, PhD". HHMI.org. Retrieved 2016-10-30.
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference :0 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  11. ^ "From Mad Cows to 'Psi-chotic' Yeast: A New Paradigm in Genetics", NAS Distinguished Leaders in Science Lecture Series, November 10, 1999.
  12. ^ "Susan Lindquist profile". MIT Biology. Archived from the original on 2016-10-30. Retrieved 2016-10-30.
  13. ^ "Whitehead Institute - News - 2014 - Master heat-shock factor supports reprogramming of normal cells to enable tumor growth and metastasis". wi.mit.edu. Retrieved 2016-10-31.
  14. ^ Heitman, Joseph (2005-09-30). "A Fungal Achilles' Heel". Science. 309 (5744): 2175–2176. doi:10.1126/science.1119321. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 16195450. S2CID 27186932.
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference :3 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ "Futures in Biotech 1 Dr. Susan Lindquist | TWiT.TV". TWiT.tv. Retrieved 2016-10-31.
  17. ^ Yossi Sheffi. "MIT and the World Economic Forum". mit.edu. Retrieved 2016-10-30.
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