Fellow

Dr Sohaila Rastan is President and Chief Executive Officer at Ceros Limited. She has made a major impact on our understanding of X inactivation. This phenomenon was first described by Mary Lyon in the 1960’s at Harwell, where Sohaila Rastan subsequently undertook her PhD under Mary Lyon’s supervision. During this period Sohaila generated evidence that X chromosome inactivation was under the control of a single inactivation centre. She followed up this work by mapping, cloning and characterising the mouse Xist gene and proving functionally that it is the X inactivation centre. Her characterisation of the gene revealed it to be very unusual with no open reading frame, its product consisting of mRNA transcripts.