Educated at University College, London (Biochemistry BSc, First Class Honours, 1969; PhD on nuclear envelopes, 1973, with Irving Johnston); continued PhD work with Werner Franke as an EMBO postdoc in Freiburg, Germany.
In 1974 I started working on the development of Dictyostelium at the Imperial Cancer Research Laboratories in London. Here I identified a morphogen called DIF-1 (a chlorinated polyketide), which controls differentiation in this organism. In 1984 I moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology as a group leader. More recently, I was a founder of the Dictyostelium genome project - now completed - and of a microarray project. Current research focussed on chemotaxis.
Eichinger, J.A. et al (2005) The genome of the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. Nature, 435, 43-57.
Saito, T., Taylor, G.W., Yang, J-Y., Neuhaus, D., Stetsenko, D., Kato, A. & Kay, R.R. (2006) Identification of new differentiation inducing factors from Dictyostelium discoideum. BBA 1760, 754-761.
Langridge, P.D. & Kay, R.R. (2006). Blebbing of Dictyostelium cells in response to chemoattractant. Exp. Cell Res. 312, 2009-2017.
Austin, M.B., Saito, T., Bowman, M.E., Haydock, S., Kato, A., Moore, B.S., Kay, R.R.* and Noel, J.P.* (2006). Biosynthesis of Dictyostelium Differentiation Inducing Factor by a hybrid type I fatty acid-type III polyketide synthase. Nature Chemical Biology 2, 494-502 *senior co-authors.
Hoeller, O. & Kay, R.R. (2007). Chemotaxis in the absence of PIP3 gradients. Curr. Biol.17, 813-817.
Traynor, D. & Kay, R.R. (2007). Possible roles of the endocytic cycle in cell motility. J. Cell Sci. 120, 2318-2327.
Serafimidis, I., Bloomfield, G., Skelton, J., Ivens, A. & Kay, R.R. (2007). A new environmentally resistant cell type from Dictyostelium. Microbiology 153, 619-630.
Saito, T., Kato, A. & Kay, R.R. (2008). DIF-1 induces the basal disc of the Dictyostelium fruiting body. Dev. Biol. 317, 444-453.
Bloomfield, G., Tanaka, Y., Skelton, J., Ivens, A. & Kay, R.R. (2008). Widespread duplications in the genomes of laboratory stocks of Dictyostelium discoideum. Genome Biology 9, R75.
Kay, R.R., Langridge, P., Traynor, D. & Hoeller, O. (2008). Changing directions in the study of chemotaxis. Nature Rev. Molec. Cell Biol. 9, 455-463.
Kay, R.R. & Thompson, C.R.L. (2009) Forming patterns in development without morphogen gradients: scattered differentiation and sorting out. In Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology,'Generation and Interpretation of Morphogen Gradients' J. Briscoe, P. Lawrence & J-P Vincent, eds; Cold Spring Harbor Press.
Neumann, C.S., Walsh, C.T., & Kay, R.R. (2010) A flavin-dependent halogenase catalyzes the chlorination step in the biosynthesis of Dictyostelium DIF-1. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 107, 5798-5803.
Zanchi, R., Howard, G., Bretscher, M.S. & Kay, R.R. (2010) The exocytic gene secA is required for Dictyostelium cell motility and osmoregulation. J. Cell Sci. 123, 3226-3234.
Bloomfield, G., Skelton, J., Ivens, A., Tanaka, Y. & Kay, R.R. (2010) Sex determination in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. Science 330, 1533-1536.
Velazquez, F., Peak-Chew, S.Y., Fernández, I.S., Neumann, C.S. & Kay, R.R. (2011). Identification of a eukaryotic reductive dechlorinase and characterization of its mechanism of action on its natural substrate. Chem. & Biol., in press.
Wong, C.C., Traynor, D., Basse, N., Kay, R.R. & Warren, A.J. (2011). Defective ribosome assembly in Shwachman-Diamond syndrome. Blood, in press.