Professor Patrick Forterre, born 21 August 1949 in Paris, is a French writer and researcher in biology. He is Head of the Department of Microbiology at the Pasteur Institute and is known for his work on Archaea, viruses and the evolution of life. Forterre was the first to use the abbreviation of "Last Universal Common Ancestor", or "LUCA", in a 1999 paper.[1][2]

Biography

In 1988, he became head of a research team at the Institute of Genetics and Microbiology (IGM) in Orsay and directed research on Archaea, the new living area discovered in 1977 by Carl Woese. In 2004, he joined the Pasteur Institute as Director of Microbiology .

Patrick Forterre is particularly known for his theories on evolution and his stances on the recognition of viruses as living beings in their own right.

He works as a scientist in the documentary film Species of Species, produced in 2008.

Scientific articles

References

  1. ^ Forterre, Patrick (1999). "Displacement of cellular proteins by functional analogues from plasmids or viruses could explain puzzling phylogenies of many DNA informational proteins". Molecular Microbiology. 33 (3): 457–465. doi:10.1046/j.1365-2958.1999.01497.x. ISSN 0950-382X. PMID 10417637. S2CID 8532861.
  2. ^ Koonin, Eugene V. (2003). Sequence - evolution - function : computational approaches in comparative genomics. Michael Y. Galperin, National Center for Biotechnology Information. Boston, Mass.: Kluwer. p. 252. ISBN 978-1-4757-3783-7. OCLC 55642057.((cite book)): CS1 maint: date and year (link)
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