Steve Clarke has been named the 107th Faculty Research Lecturer in 2009-2010 by the UCLA Academic Senate

The 107th Faculty Research Lecturer is Professor Steven Clarke. His lecture will be this Fall. Professor Clarke is Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, an authority on the biochemistry of the aging process and natural repair mechanisms. He is also Director of the UCLA Molecular Biology Institute.

Clarke studied at Pomona College and Harvard University, then was a Miller Fellow at Berkeley, before joining the faculty at UCLA in 1978.

His research at UCLA explores the roles of novel protein methyltransferases in aging and biological regulation. In fact, he has discovered several important methyl transferases, which are enzymes that attach methyl groups to proteins. He also showed the chemical reactions that produce age-damaged proteins and how cellular enzymes can reverse at least some portion of the damage. In the last few years, the lab has taken a genetic approach, exploring what happens when repair pathways are eliminated in a variety of organisms. They have developed methods to analyze genomic sequences to identify new members of the methyltransferase family. The first fruits of this work have been the identification of small molecule repair enzymes.

Clarke's lab has recently identified the last missing link in the pathway for synthesis of plant ascorbate, or Vitamin C, from glucose. The discovery could lead to crops with enhanced vitamin C production that would be more nutritious and more resistant to environmental damage.