Biophysicist Ahmet Yildiz Wins GE/Science Young Scientist Award

For his discovery of how proteins work within cells, Ahmet Yildiz, a regional winner from North America and the Grand Prize winner, today was named to receive the $25,000 Young Scientist Award, supported by GE Healthcare and the journal Science.

He will receive his award in St. Louis on Saturday 18 February, during the Annual Meeting of AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society, which publishes Science.

“First, Ahmet has improved single molecule fluorescence by developing a technique that can locate the position of a single dye to within 1.5 nanometers, which is 20 times better than has previously been achieved and 200 times better than the classical diffraction limit of light,” said Professor Paul R. Selvin, who supervised his graduate work at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “Ahmet then applied this technique to measure how Myosin V, a biomolecular motor involved in intracellular transport, moves.”

Ahmet Yildiz received the grand prize for his essay, “Elucidating the Mechanism of Molecular Motor Movement.” Yildiz grew up in Sakarya, Turkey. In 2001, he received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Bogazici University, Istanbul, and started his graduate studies in biophysics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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June 03, 2005
Gay fruit flies
Ebru Demir and Barry Dickson have shown that splicing a single male gene into female drosophila causes them to generate male sexual behavior, including approaching females rather than males [*]:
fruitless Splicing Specifies Male Courtship Behavior in Drosophila
Ebru Demir and Barry J. Dickson*
All animals exhibit innate behaviors that are specified during their development. Drosophila melanogaster males (but not females) perform an elaborate and innate courtship ritual directed toward females (but not males). Male courtship requires products of the fruitless (fru) gene, which is spliced differently in males and females. We have generated alleles of fru that are constitutively spliced in either the male or the female mode. We show that male splicing is essential for male courtship behavior and sexual orientation. More importantly, male splicing is also sufficient to generate male behavior in otherwise normal females. These females direct their courtship toward other females (or males engineered to produce female pheromones). The splicing of a single neuronal gene thus specifies essentially all aspects of a complex innate behavior.

Makes you wonder about the implications for human behavior, doesn’t it?