Lynn Dalgarno

Lynn Dalgarno (born 12 November 1935) is an Australian geneticist known for the discovery of the Shine-Dalgarno sequence with his graduate student, John Shine.

The son of Frederick Leslie Roy Dalgarno and Nadine Ilma (née Rankin) Dalgarno, Lynn Dalgarno was born at Berklea Private Hospital, Caulfield, Victoria on 13 November 1935.

Dalgarno was awarded a B.Sc.(Agr.) in 1958, conducting research with F. J. R. Hird at the Departments of Biochemistry and Agriculture, University of Melbourne, and a Ph.D. in 1962, from the Australian National University (ANU), with a dissertation titled, Respiratory metabolism and processes of uptake in a plant tissue, with research advisor, L. M. Birt at The Russell Grimwade School of Biochemistry, University of Melbourne.

In his early career (between 1963 and 1967) Dalgarno conducted research, first at the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research supported by a University of Melbourne Traveling Scholarship to London (with Edward M. Martin, collaborating with E. Horton, S. L. Liu, T. S. Work, and R. A. Cox); second, with François Gros at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique on an MRC-CNRS Exchange Scholarship; and third, a postdoctoral fellowship assisted by a U.S. Public Health Research Grant at California Institute of Technology, with Robert L. Sinsheimer.

In 1968 Dalgarno accepted a post at ANU as a Senior Lecturer, and then as a Reader from 1983 until 1996, when he subsequently became a Research Fellow.

His graduate student John Shine said Dalgarno was "a fantastic, enthusiastic lecturer, who was turned on by this molecular biology."

Dalgarno and Shine found the Shine-Dalgarno sequence, described by ANU as "the beginnings of biotechnology":

"In 1973, Lynn Dalgarno, from the ANU Department of Biochemistry, and his PhD student John Shine, proposed an initiating signal for protein synthesis in prokaryotic cells. This ribosomal binding site in bacterial messenger RNA became known as the Shine-Dalgarno (SD) sequence. It enables initiation of protein synthesis by aligning the ribosome with the start codon.

Simply put, genes are read in groups of three letters, but you need to let the ribosome know where to start.

For example, if you read 'Our dog can see the cat', it makes sense, but if you shift the starting point by one letter, it becomes 'urd ogc ans eet hec ato'.

The SD sequence tells the bacteria where to start protein synthesis so that the genes are read correctly."One of Dalgarno's colleague wrote,

"Especially noteworthy was the work of Lynn Dalgarno and his PhD student John Shine. Their pioneering work on the nature of initiating signals for protein synthesis in prokaryotic cells was published in Nature and received much international acclaim. More specifically they proposed that the pyrimidine-rich 3'- terminal ten nucleotides of the small ribosomal RNA of prokaryotes is involved in a direct, base-pairing interaction with a purine-rich section (known as the Shine-Dalgarno sequence) of the ribosome binding site of messenger RNA."