Roger Brent

Roger Brent
Roger Brent in his Lab at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Born	(1955-12-28)December 28, 1955 Spartanburg, South Carolina
Residence	United States
Citizenship	United States
Fields	Biologist
Institutions	Harvard University Molecular Sciences Institute Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Alma mater	University of Southern Mississippi Harvard University
Thesis	Regulation of the cellular response to DNA damage (1982)
Known for	Domain structure of transcription regulators, systems biology

Roger Brent (born December 28, 1955) is an American biologist known for his work on gene regulation and systems biology. He studies the quantitative behaviors of cell signaling systems and the origins and consequences of variation in them. He is Full Member in the Division of Basic Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and an Affiliate Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington.

Brent grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and received his BA in Computer Science and Statistics from the University of Southern Mississippi, where he applied AI techniques to protein folding. He performed PhD (1982) and postdoctoral work (1985) in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard University in the laboratory of Mark Ptashne. In work there he cloned the E. coli LexA repressor and showed how it controlled the cell's response to DNA damage, used LexA as a repressor in yeast, and created fusion proteins that used LexA to bring portions of yeast Gal4 and other transcription regulatory proteins to synthetic reporter genes in yeast. These domain swap experiments established the domain structure of eukaryotic transcription regulatory proteins.

Brent's use of prokaryotic repressor proteins in eukaryotes, and development of chimeric proteins containing prokaryotic DNA binding domains, enabled identification of other transcription regulatory domains and gene regulatory technologies including tetracycline-repressor controlled transcriptional repression and the Gal4 and LexA UAS systems used in other model organisms. The use of DNA binding domains to target tethered functional protein domains (for example double strand endonucleases and DNA methylases ) or bait moieties in two-hybrid experiments to defined sites on DNA is now routine.

In 1985, Brent moved to the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. His work there contributed to two-hybrid methods and to development of large scale/ general purpose functional genomic means (interaction mating and development of peptide aptamers) to detect and disrupt protein-protein interactions. In 1997, with Sydney Brenner he helped establish the Molecular Sciences Institute, a nonprofit research laboratory in Berkeley, California, and became its CEO, research director and president in 2001. He initiated his lab's studies on cell signal control and cell-to-cell variation there. He is now a Full Member of the Division of Basic Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and an Affiliate Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington.