Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty
| Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty | |
|---|---|
Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty at Science City, Kolkata on 8 Nov. 2009
|
|
| Born |
4 April 1938 Sainthia, West Bengal, British India |
| Nationality | Indian-American |
| Fields | Microbiology |
| Alma mater | University of Calcutta |
| Known for | Genetically engineering a Pseudomonas bacterium |
Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty (Bengali: আনন্দমোহন চক্রবর্তী Ānandamōhan Cakrabartī), Ph.D. is an Indian American microbiologist, scientist, and researcher, most notable for his work in directed evolution and his role in developing a genetically engineered organism using plasmid transfer while working at GE, the patent for which led to landmark Supreme Court case, Diamond v. Chakrabarty.
Ananda (generally called "Al" by scientific colleagues) Chakrabarty was born in Sainthia on 4 April 1938. He attended Sainthia High School, Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira and St. Xavier's College, Calcutta—in that order—during the course of his undergraduate education. Prof. Chakrabarty received his Ph.D. from the University of Calcutta in Kolkata, West Bengal in 1965.
Prof. Chakrabarty genetically engineered a new species of Pseudomonas bacteria ("the oil-eating bacteria") in 1971 while working for the Research & Development Center at General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York.
At the time, four known species of oil-metabolizing bacteria were known to exist, but when introduced into an oil spill, they competed with each other, limiting the amount of crude oil that they degraded. The genes necessary to degrade oil were carried on plasmids, which could be transferred among species. By irradiating the transformed organism with UV light after plasmid transfer, Prof. Chakrabarty discovered a method for genetic cross-linking that fixed all four plasmid genes in place and produced a new, stable, bacterial species (now called Pseudomonas putida) capable of consuming oil one or two orders of magnitude faster than the previous four strains of oil-eating microbes. The new microbe, which Chakrabarty called "multiplasmid hydrocarbon-degrading Pseudomonas," could digest about two-thirds of the hydrocarbons that would be found in a typical oil spill.
...
Wikipedia