May 4, 1995

Dr. Lawrence P. Wennogle
CIBA Pharmaceuticals Division
556 Morris Avenue
Summit, NJ 07901

Dear Search Committee:

This letter is in support of Anton Yuryev who is applying for postdoctoral posistion in your laboratory.  I was a member of Anton’s  thesis committee, which meet once each year to evaluate his results and discuss future experiments.  I have also heard Anton present his results at our Departmental supper meetings.

Anton’s greatest asset is his work ethic – he works extremely hard and very long hours.  As a result he generates an enormous amount of data.  His thesis has developed into a solid piece of work and is contained in two excellent papers.  The first (submitted to Genetics) describes genetic suppressor analysis of serine to alanine multiple substitution mutation in the repetitive C-terminal domain (CTC) of the large subunit of RNA polymerase II.  This led to the isolation of the SCA1 gene and established a functional difference between positions two and five of the CTD heptapeptide repeat. The second paper (submitted to Science) describes two families of proteins that interact with the CTD.  This work is particularly significant in the transcription field since virtually nothing was known about proteins that interact with CTD.  He was able to accomplish the cloning of the genes encoding CTD-interacting proteins (where others had failed) by a clever modification of the two-hybrid protein interaction screen in which he utilized the mouse CTD rather than the yeast version.

Anton is an intense experimentalist who is driven to excell.  In the early stages of his graduate career here at Hopkins, Anton'’ scientific attitude included somewhat excessive stubbornness.  That is, he passionately presented his favorite interpretations of the data and was relatively unwilling to discuss the alternatives raised as questions by those hearing his presentation.  However, over the course of his training in Jeff Corden’s laboratory, he has matured greatly in this regard and now presents and discusses his work with a more even balance and in amore discussion oriented format.

Anton will be a highly productive addition to any research group.  He is a serious scientist who works extremely hard.  I can recommend him to you highly.