User:Rallshir

Robin Campbell Allshire (born 19 May 1960) FRSE, FRS, is Professor of Chromosome Biology at University of Edinburgh and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow. His research group focuses on the epigenetic mechanisms governing the assembly of specialised domains of chromatin and their transmission through cell division.

Early Life and Education: Robin Allshire rgrew up in the fishing village of Howth, Co Dublin 1960-1978. His parents were Arthur Gordon Allshire (1925-2012) who was a Pharmacist and Freda Margaret (nee Schmutz; 1933-2014). He was awarded his B.A. (Genetics) by Trinity College, University of Dublin, in 1981 where he was motivated by the inspirational teaching of David McConnell and colleagues at the Dept of Genetics to undertake post-graduate studies. He subsequently joined the MRC Mammalian Genome Unit, University of Edinburgh where he obtained his PhD under the guidance of Chris Bostock and Ed Southern investigating the use of Bovine Papilloma Virus as a chassis for mammalian artificial chromosome construction.

Career: In 1985 Robin Allshire joined Nick Hastie's research group at the MRC Human Genetics Unit, Edinburgh (formerly MRC Clinical and Population Cytogentics Unit) as a postdoctoral researcher where he discovered that mammalian telomeres are composed of simple repetitive sequences similar to those of unicellular eukaryotes and that telomere length in blood cells shorten with age and are further eroded in cancerous cells. In 1989 he took a position as an independent visiting scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories for 18 months before joining the MRC Human Genetics Unit as an junior group leader. While at CSHL he decided to switch his focus to investigating chromosomal elements in the genetically tractable fission yeast. At the MRC HGU, Edinburgh (1990 - 2002), and subsequently at the Wellome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh (2002 - present), he discovered that genes are silenced when placed within fission yeast centromeres and subsequently utilised this gene silencing to gain fundamental insights into the processes of heterochromatin and kinetochore CENP-A chromatin establishment and maintenance. He is particularly interested in the mechanisms that trigger the fomation of these distinctive chromatin domains and the epigenetic processes that allow their persistence through mutiple cell divisions and meiosis.