Adrian Francis Stewart

A. Francis Stewart is an Australian biochemist, developmental biologist, and genetic engineer. He is an emeritus senior professor at Technische Universität Dresden.

Stewart's research focused on epigenetics and genome engineering, mainly in mammalian systems. His work in genetic engineering was acknowledged by the International Society for Transgenic Technologies Prize in 2010. He was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2007 and Academia Europaea in 2020.

Education and career Stewart earned a BSc degree in Biochemistry in 1981 and a PhD in 1985, both from the University of New South Wales, where he sequenced and investigated cloned DNAs encoding bovine milk proteins in Tony Mackinlay's laboratory. In 1991, he was appointed group leader in the Gene Expression Program at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. In 2001, he became group leader at the Biotechnology Center (BIOTEC) and chair of Genomics at Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden). From 2014 to 2016, he was the director at BIOTEC. He contributed to the expansion of the Tatzberg research campus to include the DFG Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) Excellence Initiative in 2005, and the DFG Physics of Life (PoL) Excellence Initiative in 2019.

Stewart co-founded and chaired the biotech company Gene Bridges.

Research With Colin Logie, Stewart developed ligand-inducible site-specific recombinases (SSR-LBDs). To address the thermal instability of FLP recombinase, he and Frank Buchholz engineered the thermostable variant FLPe.

To support large-scale genome engineering, Stewart and Youming Zhang developed recombineering, a method using λ-Red and/or RecE/RecT-mediated homologous recombination in E. coli, which allows for flexible and precise manipulation of large DNA constructs such as BACs. Building upon this, his lab streamlined the protocol to eliminate unwanted recombination events.

Awards and honors 2007 – Member, European Molecular Biology Organization 2010 – International Society for Transgenic Technology Prize, International Society for Transgenic Technologies 2020 – Member, Academia Europaea

Selected articles