Charles Yanofsky

Charles Yanofsky (born April 17, 1925, New York, New York, U.S.—died March 16, 2018) was an American geneticist who demonstrated the colinearity of gene and protein structures.

Yanofsky was educated at the City College of New York and at Yale University (Ph.D., 1951), where he studied chemistry and microbiology. While at Yale he showed that a suppressor mutation (change in a gene that reverses the visible effects of mutation in a second gene) results in the reappearance of an enzyme that was missing in a mutant organism. He was also part of the research team that first demonstrated that certain mutant genes produce inactive proteins, detectable with the techniques of immunology.

From 1954 to 1958 Yanofsky was at the Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, and then he moved to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. There, working with the bacterium Escherichia coli, he showed that the sequence of the nitrogen-containing bases forming part of the structure of the genetic material has a linear correspondence to the amino acid sequence of proteins. In his investigations of the biochemical actions of suppressor mutations, Yanofsky and his research group studied mutants of the mold Neurospora crassa and found that suppression resulted in the restoration of the ability to form an active enzyme in a mutant that had previously produced an inactive protein.

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During the 1970s Yanofsky turned his focus to the regulation by messenger RNA (mRNA) of the synthesis of tryptophan, an amino acid, in E. coli and Bacillus subtilis. While conducting experiments focused on discerning the mechanisms of this process in 1981, Yanofsky noticed that the cell was able to sense how much tryptophan was present and alter the transcription process accordingly, halting it if necessary. This indicated that mRNA was not the only molecule in the cell capable of regulating transcription; this phenomenon became known as transcriptional attenuation. In 2001 Yanofsky discovered one of the proteins, called anti-TRAP, that regulated the production of tryptophan in B. subtilis. It was thought that the protein was a possible precursor to disease-fighting antibodies in higher organisms.

Yanofsky was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1964), the National Academy of Sciences (1966), and the Royal Society (1985). He served as president of the Genetics Society of America in 1969. Yanofsky also received the National Academy of Sciences’ Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology (1972) and the National Medal of Science (2003).