David Charles Baulcombe

David Charles Baulcombe was born in Solihull, Warwickshire, United Kingdom in 1952. He received his B. S. degree in botany from the University of Leeds and his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. Since 1988, Dr. Baulcombe has been at the Sainsbury Laboratory Norwich, U.K., where he has established a worldrenowned program on plant viruses. Primarily, Dr. Baulcombe has conducted leading research in potexviruses, bringing Potato virus X (PVX) to the forefront of research in topics of virus movement, host resistance, and gene silencing. Dr. Baulcombe developed and pioneered the use of the PVX vector; one of the most widely used viral vectors for studying heterologous gene expression in plants. Dr. Baulcombe’s most recent contributions have been in the field of gene silencing. He has advanced a model for gene silencing detailing differences between transcriptional and posttranslational gene silencing, and has demonstrated a correlation between gene methylation and transcriptional silencing. Dr. Baulcombe further showed that there are RNA–DNA interactions that induce gene silencing and that small nucleic acid molecules are triggers of gene silencing. Most recently, Dr. Baulcombe has isolated and characterized host factors contributing to gene silencing and shown that the mechanism involves RNA degradation and requires a cytoplasmic host RNA helicase and an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase. Dr. Baulcombe also has demonstrated that while viruses can induce gene silencing some viruses encode proteins that suppress gene silencing. Dr. Baulcombe is internationally renowned for his research and serves on several committees and study sections. In 2001, Dr. Baulcombe was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.