Cell and Developmental Biology Seminar Series: Sex chromosomes and mammalian infertility

James started his career as an MD PhD student at UCL, doing a PhD in sex chromosome genetics at the National Institute for Medical Research with Paul Burgoyne. He was then a physician at West Hertfordshire NHS Trust, before continuing his studies on sex chromosomes in the Burgoyne lab as a postdoc. During that time, he did a sabbatical in the laboratories of Peter Warburton, Mount Sinai School of Medicine and David Page, Whitehead Institute, USA. He started his own research group at NIMR in 2007, was awarded tenure in 2012, and became a Faculty member at the Francis Crick Institute in April 2015. His lab studies the epigenetics, evolution and cell biology of the sex chromosomes from a variety of organisms, in order to understand how these chromosomes influence human health and disease. His lab discovered meiotic silencing, the inactivation of genes on unpaired meiotic chromosomes, which is thought to play a major role infertility. He also showed that the X chromosome, once thought to function largely in female germ cell development, is in fact enriched in genes involved in spermatogenesis, with around eighteen percent of all X-genes being expressed in developing sperm. Furthermore, he identified Rsx, the Xist-like RNA that mediates X chromosome inactivation in the second largest class of mammals, the metatherians (marsupials). Most recently, his group has demonstrated that the mouse and human germ line exhibit X dosage compensation states that provide insight into the aetiology of sex chromosome infertility. In 2014 he was awarded the Wain Medal for his work on sex chromosome biology, and in 2015 became a recipient of a European Research Council Consolidator Award.