James Turner, Assistant Research Director & Senior Group Leader at The Francis Crick Institute, is distinguished for his outstanding contributions to mammalian sex chromosome biology. He discovered a new epigenetic mechanism called meiotic silencing which acts as a checkpoint to prevent aneuploidy in offspring, and is mediated by the DNA-repair factors BRCA1 and ATR.
He focused on the mammalian X and Y chromosome and identified mechanisms responsible for infertility in the three common sex chromosome aneuploidies. Using multi-disciplinary computational, ‘omics’, genome-engineering, and stem-cell approaches, he established interventions to restore fertility in mouse models for all three of these conditions. He also devised a method to correct trisomy in Down's syndrome patient cells.