Patrick H. O'Farrell

Patrick O'Farrell graduated from McGill University in Montreal, and did his graduate work in the University of Colorado, where he developed the technique of two-dimensional gel electrophoresis of proteins. He did postdoctoral work with Gordon Tomkins and Bruce Alberts at UCSF, San Francisco. In 1979 he joined the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry at UCSF, at which point he switched his research to focus on early development in Drosophila. His laboratory contributed to the early cloning of homeobox genes, and was the first to show that homeodomain proteins are sequence specific DNA binding proteins and transcriptional regulators. Other early studies defined a cascade of regulatory events guiding engrailed expression and embryonic segmentation. Subsequent work focused on developmental control of the cell cycle and elucidated the mechanism controlling the temporal program of cell division in the embryo. Current cell cycle work is focused on timing regulation, the mechanisms that govern the time at which embryonic cell cycles slow down and on mechanisms controlling cycle duration. Recent work has demonstrated the importance of regulation of S phase duration in these events. A new project area explores the biology and genetics of the mitochondrial genome.

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