Bik Kwoon Tye

Bik Kwoon Yeung Tye (; born c. 1947) is a Chinese-American molecular geneticist and structural biologist. Tye's pioneering work on eukaryotic DNA replication led to the discovery of the minichromosome maintenance (MCM) genes in 1984, which encode the catalytic core of the eukaryotic replisome. Tye also determined the first high-resolution structures of both the MCM complex and the Origin Recognition Complex (ORC) in 2015 and 2018. Tye is currently a Professor "Emeritus" (2015) at Cornell University and a visiting professor at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. She is married to Henry Sze-Hoi Tye and is the mother of Kay Tye and Lynne Tye.
Early life and education.
Tye was born and raised in Hong Kong where she attended St. Stephen's Girls’ College from kindergarten through high school. She then obtained a full scholarship to pursue undergraduate studies in chemistry at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, USA and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1969. Upon graduation, Tye moved to California to complete an M.Sc. in biochemistry at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) supervised by Cho Hao Li (李卓皓). Following her master's in 1971, Tye pursued Ph.D. training in genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the joint mentorship of David Botstein and Joel Huberman. In 1974, Tye was awarded the Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Research Fellowship with which she pursued further research training in molecular genetics under the supervision of Bob Lehman at Stanford University until 1977. Her postdoctoral work on DNA replication lead to the discovery of short Okazaki fragments generated during aberrant DNA repair in E.coli.
Career and research.
After Tye's foundational contributions to the field of prokaryotic DNA replication while at Stanford University she moved to Ithaca, New York and started her own laboratory at Cornell University in 1977. In her independent career, Tye began forging new discoveries surrounding DNA replication in eukaryotes, an understudied area at the time. Tye took a genetic approach to isolate mutants that regulate DNA replication which led to her identification of the minichromosome maintenance (MCM) genes in yeast in 1984. She specifically identified the MCM2, MCM3, MCM5 and MCM10 genes in yeast. Her findings together with the identification of the origin recognition complex (ORC) by Bell and Stillman in 1992 generated substantial momentum in the field of eukaryotic DNA replication.
Tye's contributions to the field continued throughout her tenure at Cornell. Throughout the 1990s, Tye functionally characterized the components of eukaryotic DNA replication machinery. At Cornell, Tye mentored numerous graduate students, was the associate chair of the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular, and Cell Biology, directed the Genetics and Development Graduate Studies Program, and finally received her Emerita status in 2015 for her contributions to the Cornell community.
More recently, Tye began a visiting professorship at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology where she began to address a large gap in the field: the lack of high-resolution structures for ORC and MCM. To place genetic and biochemical DNA replication data into structural context, Tye began using cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to identify the structures of these molecular complexes at near-atomic resolution. She helped determine the high resolution structures of the MCM complexes in 2015 and ORC in 2018.
Personal life.
Tye is married to Henry Sze-Hoi Tye. Tye is the mother of Kay Tye, professor of systems neurobiology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and Lynne Tye, web developer and founder of Key Values.