Education
He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Goshen College and his Doctor of Philosophy in Virology from Harvard University under the mentorship of Jack West. Szostak.
biochemist university professor molecular biologist
He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Goshen College and his Doctor of Philosophy in Virology from Harvard University under the mentorship of Jack West. Szostak.
While in the Szostak lab, Bartel isolated the first ribozymes directly from random sequence, using in vitro evolution (among these, the Class I ligase). After he became independent at the Whitehead Institute, he further evolved this ribozyme to function as a Ribonucleic acid-dependent Ribonucleic acid polymerase to extend primers on external Ribonucleic acid templates, bolstering the "Ribonucleic acid world" theory. Bartel later shifted his research focus towards microRNA biology and in particular on understanding their regulatory functions.
His lab was one of three that found that animals have many of these small regulatory RNAs, and he was the first to describe microRNAs in plants.
Through his work with microRNAs, he developed a methodology that predicts their regulatory targets and created the web-based tool TargetScan, which calculates a microRNA’s targets based on its seed region. His research has also shown that most human mRNAs are regulated by microRNAs.
In 2006, he was placed second by Thomson Reuters in a "citations" ranking in the field of Molecular Biology/Genetics.
National Academy of Sciences.
