HFSPO warmly congratulates the following former HFSP Research Grant holders and HFSP Nakasone Award winners:
C. David Allis and Michael Grunstein on receiving the 2018 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award “for discoveries elucidating how gene expression is influenced by chemical modification of histones—the proteins that package DNA within chromosomes.” David Allis of the Rockefeller University in New York, USA was awarded HFSP Research Grants in 1997 and 2000 for projects titled “Regulation of histone acetylation in Drosophila” and “Coupling signaling to chromatin modifications” respectively. Michael Grunstein of the University of California, Los Angeles, USA received an HFSP Research Grant in 1996 to work on “Chromatin-mediated gene silencing.”
Christine Petit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, who was awarded the 2018 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, together with A. James Hudspeth and Robert Fettiplace, “for their pioneering work on the molecular and neural mechanisms of hearing.” Christine Petit received an HFSP Research Grant in 1999 to research “brain development and neurological diseases: analysis of KAL-1, the gene implicated in X-linked Kallmann's syndrome.”
The 2016 HFSP Nakasone Award winners, Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Germany and Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, USA, who were honored with the 2018 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, together with Virginijus Šikšnys, “for the invention of CRISPR-Cas9, a precise nanotool for editing DNA, causing a revolution in biology, agriculture, and medicine.”