Ann Hochschild

Ann Hochschild has made fundamental contributions in two areas: transcription regulation and protein-based heredity. Her laboratory’s exploration of the minimal requirements for transcription activation led to the development of a widely used bacteria-based two-hybrid assay for detecting protein-protein interactions. Subsequent work provided new mechanistic insight into the regulation of transcription elongation. Recent work addresses the question of whether bacteria harbor prions. Having demonstrated that bacterial cells have the requisite molecular machinery to propagate a fungal prion, Hoschschild’s laboratory recently uncovered evidence for the existence of endogenous prion-forming proteins in bacteria, a previously unrecognized source of epigenetic diversity in these organisms.