Bik K. Tye

Biosketch

Bik Kwoon Tye is Professor emeritus at Cornell University and a Senior Member of the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study. She received her education and training from Wellesley College (BA, 1969), University of California, San Francisco (M.Sc. 1971), MIT (PhD, 1974) and Stanford University (Postdoc, 1977). She was a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow (1974-77). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2023).

Research Interests

Dr. Tye’s interest in DNA replication began with her postdoctoral training at Stanford where she discovered that short Okazaki fragments were generated by aberrant DNA repair in E. coli. At Cornell, her first project was to screen for yeast DNA replication initiation mutants called mcm that exhibit an ARS-specific minichromosome maintenance defect. The MCM2-7 protein complex was later shown to form the catalytic core of the replicative helicase. With Dr. Yuanliang Zhai, she established the DNA Replication Group with a research focus on high resolution structures of DNA replication complexes in yeast. Together, they have determined the cryoEM structures of the yeast origin recognition complex, the yeast and human pre-replication complex, and other MCM associated replication complexes. She combines atomic structure models with genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology studies to make sense of the elaborate mechanisms that regulate DNA replication initiation and replisome assembly.