LAUSR

At the outset, it is emphasized that this is not an obituary but a memorial to celebrate the genius and contributions of Amar Klar, who died from a freak head injury in his yard on March 5, 2017. Amar Klar belonged to the generation of the ‘Midnight’s Children’, many of whom went on to make a mark for themselves. He was born on April 1, 1947, to a farming family who migrated from Lyallpur in Pakistan to settle in Sangrur (Punjab, India). He obtained his BSc in biochemistry from Punjab Agriculture University, Ludhiana, in 1967 and MSc in microbiology from Haryana Agriculture University, Hisar, in 1969. Thereafter, he obtained his PhD in bacteriology under the supervision of Seymour Fogel at the University of Wisconsin in 1975. This was followed by a post-doctorate with Harlyn O Halvorson at the University of California at Berkeley, during which he contributed significantly to the emerging field of mating-type switching in budding yeast. He provided the key genetic evidence for the cassette model for mating type locus and co-discovered the trans-acting factor MAR1/SIR2, which keeps the silent cassettes repressed (Klar and Fogel 1979; Klar et al. 1979). These seminal discoveries were noticed by the upcoming group of Jeff Starthern and Jim Hicks at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory working to decipher the underlying molecular mechanisms of mating type. Based on their enthusiastic recommendation, Jim Watson, who received Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA and was the Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, telephoned Amar Klar offering him the job at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Here, together, Jeff Starthern, Jim Hicks and Amar Klar investigated threadbare the major aspects of regulation of matingtype switching, silencing and directionality, making the mating-type system a paradigm of gene regulation and recombination, which became the stuff of textbooks as reference for future students and researchers. In addition, Amar also jumped in to the newly discovered system of mating type in fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe. Based simply on one report by Miyata and Miyata showing that cells of fission yeast undergo a switch to the opposite mating type in only one out of the four granddaughter cells following two asymmetric cell divisions, Amar Klar tested and confirmed that the asymmetric switching involves imprinting and segregation of the one of the two strands of DNA, the so-called strand segregation model (Klar 1987, 1990). In 1988 Amar Klar moved to NCI-ABL Basic Research Program at Frederick, MD. It was a stroke of luck that I got to work under the guidance of Amar Klar. He hired me after a ten-minute telephonic interview while I was doing my first post-doctorate in Canada. Later, he confided that he liked my response to his query as to why I was interested in his lab, that the strand segregation may hold the key to asymmetric divisions during metazoan development. His first and very charitable remark after I joined him was, ‘Jag, you are an expert in biochemistry and I in genetics. Let us work together’. I think he said so to make me feel at ease although I always remained in awe of the scientific luminaries like him and Jeff. Soon, I found him to be a most unusual type of researcher. Beneath his rugged exterior and down-to-earth behaviour was a rather astute, original and sharp intellect. The work environment in his lab and the