Peter Anthony Koopman FAA (born 3 December 1959) is an Australian biologist best known for his role in the discovery and study of the mammalian Y-chromosomal sex-determining gene, Sry.
[5] Lovell-Badge's team, collaborating with Peter Goodfellow and colleagues at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, discovered a new candidate gene, Sry.
Much of Koopman's subsequent research has focused on understanding how Sry acts to direct the formation of testes in the embryo, triggering male development.
[20] His group discovered that the vitamin A metabolite retinoic acid stimulates germ cells to enter meiosis, a critical step in the formation of gametes.
[21] They also demonstrated that the developmental signaling molecule Nodal and its receptor Cripto regulate male germ cell pluripotency in the fetal gonad,[22] opening the way for new non-invasive diagnostics and targeted additional therapies for testicular cancers.
He was organizer of the Cold Spring Harbor (USA) Workshop on Molecular Embryology of the Mouse (1995-1998), and Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Germinal Stem Cell Biology (2017).