Alec J. JEFFREYS is the Royal Society Wolfson Research Professor in the Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester. Alec J. JEFFREYS is a citizen of Great Britain. He was born in 1950.

The human genome is composed of 3,000,000,000 bases or chemical letters. In spite of a faithful transmission of this inherited information at each generation, the genome comprises a large number of small variations that make each individual unique. Alec J. JEFFREYS is studying when, where and by which mechanisms such variations are generated. He discovered first the RFLPs. They consist of simple base mutations that are sufficiently numerous to identify the paternal or maternal origin of genes and to establish gene maps. Subsequently, he discovered the minisatellites consisting of short sequence repeats that are often of variable length. Based on this discovery he devised the method of genetic fingerprinting which is now widely used in legal medicine to identify individuals. He took again a highly original approach to study the basic rules of DNA recombination during meiosis and found that this reciprocal exchange between DNA of maternal and paternal origin occurs at preferential sites in the genome.

With the Louis-Jeantet Prize for medicine, Alec J. JEFFREYS wants to study further the mechanisms that underlie human meiotic DNA recombination as well as other forms of mutagenesis that contribute to the diversity and evolution of the human genome. This will directly shed light on the origin of human inherited diseases, the origin of our species and of human populations. Alec J. JEFFREYS plans to recruit to this project a new collaborator.

 

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