YANOFSKY, CHARLES

born April 17, 1925, New York, N.Y., U.S. American geneticist who demonstrated the colinearity of gene and protein structures. Yanofsky was educated at the City College of New York and at Yale University (Ph.D., 1951), where he studied chemistry and microbiology. While at Yale he showed that a suppressor mutation (change in a gene that reverses the visible effects of mutation in a second gene) results in the reappearance of an enzyme that was missing in a mutant organism. He was also part of the research team that first demonstrated that certain mutant genes produce inactive proteins, detectable with the techniques of immunology. From 1954 to 1958 Yanofsky was at Western Reserve University Medical School in Cleveland, Ohio, and he then moved to Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif. There, working with the bacterium Escherichia coli, he showed that the sequence of the nitrogen-containing bases forming part of the structure of the genetic material has a linear correspondence to the amino acid sequence of proteins. In his investigations of the biochemical actions of suppressor mutations, Yanofsky and his research group studied mutants of the mold Neurospora crassa and found that suppression resulted in the restoration of the ability to form an active enzyme in a mutant that had previously produced an inactive protein. He was elected president of the Genetics Society of America in 1969 and received the National Academy of Sciences Award in Microbiology for 1972.