NIH Mourns Passing of Kristie
Dr. Thomas Kristie, an investigator in NIH’s NIAID Laboratory of Viral Diseases for more than 30 years and chief of the molecular genetics section since 2001, passed away on March 25 after a long illness.
Kristie was a pioneer in the field of DNA virus epigenetics and worked on aspects of herpes viral gene regulation and viral chromatin. His work spanned fundamental aspects of gene regulation in vitro to translational research. He was the first to identify specific histone modulating enzymes that could be inhibited to prevent reactivation of herpes viruses in vivo.
He received his Ph.D. from the Committee on Virology at the University of Chicago for his dissertation research with Dr. Bernard Roizman. In this research, he distinguished the promoter sequences of herpes simplex virus immediate-early (IE) promoters from early promoters and identified the host and viral proteins binding to these sequences.
As a postdoc with Phil Sharp at MIT, Kristie showed that host proteins in the aTIF complex included octamer binding factor 1 (Oct-1). He further showed that a host factor, called C-1 or host cell factor 1 (HCF-1), assembles the complex involving VP16 and Oct-1.
In his own laboratory, Kristie showed that HCF-1 is in the cytoplasm of neurons where it is unable to promote the IE gene transcription of neurons, contributing to establishment of latent infection. He further showed that HCF-1 recruited histone methyltransferases to the IE gene promoters to remove heterochromatic modifications and add euchromatic modifications to histone H3 on the IE gene promoters. He had the idea that blocking removal of the heterochromatin modifications by specific inhibitors would block HSV lytic infection and reactivation from latent infection, which he showed in cell culture and animal models.
Kristie won several awards including the 2009 Norman P. Salzman Memorial Mentor Award in Virology, a 2010 NIAID Merit Award, and in 2012 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.
NIAID remembers Kristie as a wonderful friend and colleague. He enjoyed organizing the biennial NIH meeting on viral epigenetics, which convenes DNA virologists and chromatin researchers.
In his free time, Kristie enjoyed restoring his house with historic accuracy and was a proud caregiver to several displaced racing greyhound dogs. To share from a book he often quoted, “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”