Robin Holliday FRS FAA (6 November 1932 – 9 April 2014) was a British molecular biologist.
[1] Holliday described a mechanism of DNA-strand exchange that attempted to explain gene-conversion events that occur during meiosis in fungi.
In 1988 he moved to a Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation CSIRO laboratory in Sydney, Australia, where he continued to study ageing, and his book Understanding Ageing was published in 1995.
The main focus of his experimental work was the epigenetic control of gene expression by DNA methylation in CHO cells.
These experiments provide direct evidence that DNA methylation is a primary cause of gene silencing in mammalian cells.