28 Facts About Jay Dunlap

Jay Dunlap is an American chronobiologist and photobiologist who has made significant contributions to the field of chronobiology by investigating the underlying mechanisms of circadian systems in Neurospora, a fungus commonly used as a model organism in biology, and in mice and mammalian cell culture models.

Major contributions by Jay Dunlap include his work investigating the role of frq and wc clock genes in circadian rhythmicity, and his leadership in coordinating the whole genome knockout collection for Neurospora.

Jay Dunlap is currently the Nathan Smith Professor of Molecular and Systems Biology at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.

Jay Dunlap originally planned to pursue oceanography in his graduate studies.

However, after meeting with John Woodland Hastings, who studied the circadian regulation of bioluminescence in marine organisms, Jay Dunlap decided to study biology in graduate school at Harvard University.

Jay Dunlap was unable to clone frequency, a gene that has an important role in the transcription-translation negative feedback-loop that drives circadian rhythms in Neurospora, as the Santa Cruz lab did not have the molecular tools necessary to study Neurospora's molecular biology in depth.

Jay Dunlap learned basic molecular techniques as he worked alongside fellow biology graduate students in other labs.

At one point, Dunlap worked with Harry F Noller, a renowned biochemist whose lab had "unofficially adopted" Dunlap.

In 1984, Jay Dunlap secured a junior faculty position at the Department of Biochemistry at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.

Jay Dunlap became a professor of Biochemistry in 1994 before being named the Inaugural Chair of the Department of Genetics in 1999.

In 2010, Jay Dunlap was named Nathan Smith Professor, and in 2016, he was appointed inaugural chair of the Department of Molecular and Systems Biology which subsumed Genetics and other departments.

However, clock genes were not yet cloned when Jay Dunlap began his research as an assistant professor in 1984.

Jay Dunlap correctly predicted that single cells, including mammalian cells, can act as autonomous oscillators with their own intrinsic circadian rhythms.

Jay Dunlap deciphered the circadian system by framing and addressing three problems in cellular metabolism:.

Jay Dunlap's observation, combined with the ability to transform Neurospora with exogenous DNA, provided the basis for a novel strategy to clone frq, namely by transformation-based rescue of the null mutant behavioral phenotype.

Additionally, Jay Dunlap demonstrated the role of protein phosphorylation in the clock mechanism and has done research involving the role of these proteins on the temperature compensation mechanism.

Four years later in 2013, Jay Dunlap and colleagues found that FRQ is an Intrinsically Disordered Protein whose stability is determined by its interaction with partner protein FRH.

The kinetics of these circadian processes, Jay Dunlap discovered, are heavily influenced by progressive phosphorylation of FRQ.

In 1995, Loros and Jay Dunlap worked to uncover the molecular basis underlying how light resets the clock, a mechanism later shown in collaborative work with Hitoshi Okamura to be conserved in mammals.

The realization that a complete understanding of this biochemical process would require a combined genetics approach led Jay Dunlap to begin his study of the circadian clock of the Neurospora.

For example, Jay Dunlap's lab developed the first gene replacement for Neurospora in 1991.

Jay Dunlap spearheaded the push to knock out all 10,000 genes in the Neurospora genome and construction of a high-density single nucleotide polymorphism map.

Finally, Jay Dunlap revolutionized the role of luciferase expression by examining codon bias and is using its implications in Neurospora and other organisms.

Jay Dunlap continues to investigate the circadian clock, using Neurospora and other organisms, such as Aspergillus fumigatus.

Jay Dunlap is interested in the interaction between biological clocks and metabolic processes.

Jay Dunlap has been involved in work examining the hierarchical network of transcription factors that govern circadian output.

Recently, Jay Dunlap looked into the evolutionary conservation of the circadian clock among species.

Jay Dunlap concluded that because disordered proteins are so conserved among different species, the proteins must be essential for the control of the circadian rhythms across species.