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About Jef Boeke
- Jef D.
- Boeke is an American geneticist who is currently the founding director of The Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Medical Center.
- From 1986 to 2014 he was on the faculty of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he was the founding director of the High Throughput (HiT) Center.
- He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the National Academy of Sciences.Boeke received a Bachelor's degree summa cum laude in Biochemistry in 1976 from Bowdoin College.
- He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa chapter at Bowdoin.
- He then received a PhD in Molecular Biology from Rockefeller University in 1982, where he worked with Peter Model and Norton Zinder on the genetics of the filamentous phage.
- He did his postdoctoral work at The Whitehead Institute of MIT as a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow with Gerald Fink.Boeke is primarily known for his pioneering fundamental genetic and biochemical work on understanding the mechanisms of DNA transposition.
- He along with Gerald Fink discovered the mechanism by which yeast Ty1 transposable elements move via an RNA intermediate.
- He coined the term "retrotransposon" to describe transposable elements that move via this process.
- These retrotransposons are distantly related to retroviruses such as HIV. Boeke is currently leading an international team of collaborators in an effort to construct a synthetic version of the entire genome of Baker's Yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
- It was reported in March 2014, that Boeke along with this team had synthesized the third smallest chromosome, chromosome III.
- The synthetic chromosome was designed to be shorter and more stable than the original.
- The effort to complete all 16 chromosomes of S.
- cerevisae is currently underway and is reportedly half complete.
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