Francis Stewart's Biography

Francis Stewart, Professor, Technische Universitat Dresden

Prof. A. Francis STEWART works on (i) epigenetic mechanisms of transcriptional regulation and (ii) genetic engineering technology. Early progress in epigenetics included the discovery of the PHD finger and the first H3K4 lysine methyltransferase – the yeast Set1Complex. The proteomic description of Set1C identified the first linkage between H3K4 methylation and trithorax-Group action. Current work is focused on the roles of the H3K4 methyltransferases and demethylases in mammalian development and homeostasis using conditional mutagenesis in the mouse and ES (embryonic stem) cell models. The lab pioneered several technologies for genetic engineering, notably the now widely used ligand (usually tamoxifen) regulated Cre recombinase gene switch for conditional mutagenesis; ‘recombineering’ – the use of homologous recombination by the lambda phage Red operon in E.coli for DNA engineering; the use of BACs for gene targeting and recently BAC transposons.
Stewart received his PhD from the University of New South Wales, Australia and then joined Guenther Schuetz at the German Cancer Research Center for post-doctoral studies on steroid hormone action and chromatin. He joined EMBL in 1991 as a Group Leader and left in 2001 to take his current position as chair of Genomics at Dresden University of Technology.