Sergei Mirkin

Sergei Mirkin (born September 29, 1956) is a Russian-American biologist who studies genome instability mediated by repetitive DNA during DNA replication and transcription. He is a professor of Genetics and Molecular Biology and holds the White Family Chair in Biology at Tufts University.

Early life and education Mirkin was born in Moscow, Russia. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1978, where he majored in Genetics. Mirkin went on to pursue a Candidate of Sciences degree in Molecular Biology at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Molecular Genetics. His thesis was under the supervision of Roman B. Khesin, a molecular biologist and Mirkin later described his formative years in the Khesin lab in his essay, “Thinking of R.B. Khesin”. By studying conditionally lethal mutants of DNA gyrase, he established a fundamental interplay between DNA supercoiling and transcription in E. coli.

Career and research Mirkin conducted his postdoctoral studies at the Institute of Molecular Genetics with Maxim Frank-Kamenetskii, a biophysicist. This work culminated with the discovery of the three-stranded H-DNA structure. Mirkin moved to the US as a Fogarty International Fellow in 1989 and joined the faculty of the Department of Genetics at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) in 1990. He worked at UIC until 2006 rising to the rank of Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. In 2007, he joined Tufts University as a professor and the White Family Chair in Biology.

Mirkin’s major contributions to science include discovering of the first multi-stranded DNA structure (H-DNA); detection of dynamic non-B DNA structures, including DNA cruciforms and triplexes in vivo; discovery that replication through trinucleotide repeats is compromised due to their unusual structures resulting in trinucleotide repeat disorder and unraveling the mechanisms and consequences of transcription-replication collisions in vivo.

The continues studying genome structure and function from two perspectives: the mechanisms responsible for the instability of DNA repeats implicated in human disease, the role of transcription-replication collisions in genome instability and the mechanisms of genome instability mediated at interstitial telomeric sequences.

Selected publications

Awards and honors Editor-in-Chief, Current Opinions in Genetics and Development, 2010-2013 Distinguished Senior Scholar Award, Tufts University, 2020