My group is long-standing interested in understanding the DNA repair processes contributing to genome integrity. To provide new insights into the mechanisms of genome integrity my laboratory has pioneered the development of DNA curtains, which allow for the direct visualization of hundreds to thousands of individual molecules in real-time by optical microscopy. This experimental platform is applicable to many biological questions and allows us to address questions about complex biological problems that cannot be easily addressed through traditional approaches. The primary advantages of our studies are that we can see what proteins are bound to DNA, where they are bound, how they move, and how they influence one another, all in real time, at the level of a single reaction. Our success in technology development has uniquely positioned the lab to reveal new concepts regarding protein-nucleic acid interactions & the mechanisms of genome integrity. Ongoing studies focus on understanding the fundamental mechanistic principles that underlie eukaryotic genome stability and determining how these principles contribute to human cancers and cancer-prone syndromes.
