Stephen D. Levene

Dr. Stephen Levene is a biophysicist and professor of bioengineering, molecular biology, and physics at the University of Texas at Dallas.[1]

Stephen Daniel Levene
Born
New York, NY
NationalityAmerican
CitizenshipAmerican
Alma materColumbia University
Yale University
Known forNucleic acid structure and function, physical genomics
Scientific career
FieldsChemistry, Biophysics, Bioengineering
InstitutionsUniversity of Texas at Dallas
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
University of California, San Diego
ThesisStudies of Sequence-directed Bending and Flexibility in DNA (1985)
Doctoral advisorDonald M. Crothers
Websitehttps://labs.utdallas.edu/levenelab/


Early life and education

Levene was born in New York City and attended Horace Mann School and Andrew Hill High School in San Jose, California. He received his A.B. in Chemistry from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Yale University. His doctoral work demonstrated and quantified the phenomenon of sequence-directed bending in DNA due to adenine-thymine tracts,[2][3] and pioneered the use of Monte Carlo simulation to compute cyclization probabilities of DNA molecules having arbitrary preferred geometries.[4][5][6] Upon leaving Yale, Levene became an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow at UC San Diego with Bruno Zimm, where he worked on the physical mechanism of gel electrophoresis.[7][8][9]

Career

Research interests

Levene's research interests are broadly in the area of genome architecture and its maintenance by enzyme mechanisms and protein-DNA interactions. His work in this area began from the time he was a Staff Scientist at the Human Genome Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, when he collaborated with Nicholas Cozzarelli's group on the structure and properties of supercoiled DNA[10] and DNA catenanes.[11] Levene's group has made both experimental and theoretical/computational contributions to understanding DNA topology and its relationship to local DNA structures,[12][13][14] DNA-loop formation,[15][16][17] site-specific DNA recombination,[18][19] the structure of human telomeres,[20][21] and extrachromosomal-circular DNA.[22]

References
  1. UT-Dallas Bioengineering Web Page
  2. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 79, 7664-7668 (1982)
  3. Levene, Stephen D.; Ming Wu, Hen; Crothers, Donald M. (1986). "Bending and flexibility of kinetoplast DNA". Biochemistry. 25: 3988–3995. doi:10.1021/bi00362a003.
  4. Levene, Stephen D.; Crothers, Donald M. (1986). "Ring closure probabilities for DNA fragments by Monte Carlo simulation". Journal of Molecular Biology. 189: 61–72. doi:10.1016/0022-2836(86)90381-5.
  5. Levene, Stephen D.; Crothers, Donald M. (1986). "Topological distributions and the torsional rigidity of DNA". Journal of Molecular Biology. 189: 73–83. doi:10.1016/0022-2836(86)90382-7.
  6. Methods Enzymol 212, 3-29 (1992)
  7. Levene, SD; Zimm, BH (1987). "Separations of open-circular DNA using pulsed-field electrophoresis". Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 84: 4054–7. doi:10.1073/pnas.84.12.4054. PMC 305020. PMID 3295875.
  8. Science 245, 396-399 (1989)
  9. Zimm, BH; Levene, SD (1992). "Problems and prospects in the theory of gel electrophoresis of DNA". Q Rev Biophys. 25: 171–204. doi:10.1017/s0033583500004662. PMID 1518924.
  10. Vologodskii, AV; Levene, SD; Klenin, KV; Frank-Kamenetskii, M; Cozzarelli, NR (1992). "Conformational and thermodynamic properties of supercoiled DNA". J Mol Biol. 227: 1224–43. doi:10.1016/0022-2836(92)90533-p. PMID 1433295.
  11. Levene, SD; Donahue, C; Boles, TC; Cozzarelli, NR (1995). "Analysis of the structure of dimeric DNA catenanes by electron microscopy". Biophys J. 69: 1036–45. doi:10.1016/S0006-3495(95)79978-7. PMC 1236332. PMID 8519958.
  12. Tsen, H; Levene, SD (1997). "Supercoiling-dependent flexibility of adenosine-tract-containing DNA detected by a topological method". Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 94: 2817–22. doi:10.1073/pnas.94.7.2817. PMC 20279. PMID 9096303.
  13. Tsen, H; Levene, SD (2004). "Analysis of chemical and enzymatic cleavage frequencies in supercoiled DNA". J Mol Biol. 336: 1087–102. doi:10.1016/j.jmb.2003.12.079. PMID 15037071.
  14. J Chem Phys 141, 174902 (2014)
  15. Biophys J 90, 1903-1912 (2006)
  16. PlosONE 1, e136 (2006)
  17. Biopolymers 103, 528-538 (2015)
  18. J Mol Biol 286, 1-13 (1999)
  19. J Mol Biol 357, 1089-1104 (2006)
  20. Wright, WE; Tesmer, VM; Huffman, KE; Levene, SD; Shay, JW (November 1997). "Normal human chromosomes have long G-rich telomeric overhangs at one end". Genes Dev. 11: 2801–9. doi:10.1101/gad.11.21.2801. PMC 316649. PMID 9353250.
  21. Huffman, KE; Levene, SD; Tesmer, VM; Shay, JW; Wright, WE (2000). "Telomere shortening is proportional to the size of the G-rich telomeric 3'-overhang". J Biol Chem. 275: 19719–22. doi:10.1074/jbc.M002843200. PMID 10787419.
  22. G3: Genes Genomes Genet 7, 3295-3303 (2017)
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