Fellow

Kim Nasmyth is Head of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford. Most of his work has used the yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, though recently he has increasingly turned his attention to mammalian cells. His major discoveries include the phenomenon of gene silencing and aspects of mating type switching in yeast, transcriptional regulation of the cell cycle, roles of cyclin dependent kinases in driving the cell cycle and particularly in preventing reinitiation of replication. Recently he has established how replicated sister chromatids are held together until mitosis, with the remarkable discovery of cohesin rings holding the two daughter duplexes together until they are cleaved in the metaphase/anaphase transition.