Clyde A. Hutchison III
| Clyde A. Hutchison III | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Biochemistry, microbiology |
| Institutions | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| Education | Yale University |
| Alma mater | California Institute of Technology |
| Known for | Research on site-directed mutagenesis and synthetic biology |
Clyde A. Hutchison III is an American biochemist and microbiologist notable for his research on site-directed mutagenesis and synthetic biology. He is Professor Emeritus of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Distinguished Professor at the J Craig Venter Institute, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Hutchison graduated from Yale University in 1960, with a B.S. degree in Physics. He studied for his PhD at Caltech, working on the bacteriophage ΦX174. While at Caltech he began a long-term collaboration with Marshall Edgell. In 1968 he moved to UNC-Chapel Hill. Hutchison and Edgell used restriction enzymes for the analysis of ΦX174 and mammalian DNA.
Hutchison participated in the determination of the first complete sequence of a DNA molecule (ΦX174) when he spent a year sabbatical at the Frederick Sanger's laboratory in 1975/1976.
In 1971, Clyde Hutchison and Marshall Edgell showed that it is possible to produce mutants with small fragments of bacteriophage ϕX174 and restriction nucleases. Hutchison later collaborated with Michael Smith and developed a more general method of site-directed mutagenesis using a mutant oligonucleotide primer and DNA polymerase. Smith and Hutchison used a 12-nucleotide oligomer with a centrally positioned single mismatched nucleotide as primer, a circular single-stranded ϕX174 DNA as template, and E. coli DNA polymerase I in which the 5'-exonuclease had been inactivated by subtilisin. The polymerization with the primer annealed to the template generated a double-stranded DNA product that contained a mutation and could be converted to a closed circular duplex by enzymatic ligation.Transfection of E. coli with this molecule produced a mixed population of wild-type and mutated phage DNA. For his part in the development of this process, Michael Smith later shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993 with Kary B. Mullis, who invented polymerase chain reaction.
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