About John Woodland Hastings
John Woodland "Woody" Hastings, (March 24, 1927 – August 6, 2014) was a leader in the field of photobiology, especially bioluminescence, and was one of the founders of the field of circadian biology (the study of circadian rhythms, or the sleep-wake cycle). He was the Paul C. Mangelsdorf Professor of Natural Sciences and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. He published over 400 papers and co-edited three books. Hastings research on bioluminescence principally focused on bacterial luminescence (over 150 papers) and dinoflagellates (over 80 papers). In addition to bacteria and dinoflagellates, he, with his students and colleagues, also published papers on the biochemical and molecular mechanisms of light production in fungi, cnidarians, ctenophores, polychaetes, insects (fireflies and dipterans), ostracod crustaceans, millipedes, tunicates, and fishes with bacterial light organs. His laboratory produced the first evidence for quorum sensing in bacteria, early evidence of the molecular mechanisms of circadian clock regulation in organisms (first using dinoflagellate luminescence and then expanded to other cellular proteins), and some of the initial studies of energy transfer in green fluorescent proteins (GFP) in cnidarian luminescence. McElroy, another student of Harvey’s, at Johns Hopkins University where he discovered both the stimulatory effects of coenzyme A and gating control by oxygen of firefly luminescence, and that flavin is a substrate in bacterial luminescence.
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