Fellow

Professor Azim Surani is Mary Marshall and Arthur Walton Professor of the Physiology of Reproduction at the University of Cambridge. Azim Surani is distinguished for his contributions to mammalian embryology and in particular for his discovery of genome imprinting during gamete formation. This provided fundamental new insight into developmental genetics and demonstrated that, in mammals, male and female genomes are not functionally equivalent. Using nuclear transplantation techniques, he demonstrated that the differences between parental genomes are heritable and using transgenic mice, went on to show for the first time that DNA methylation is a component of this heritability, which is determined by the parental origin of these loci.