News
Congratulations to Ziyi for completing a comprehensive analysis of MCM nuclear import and chromatin loading. See below:
Wang Z, Zhang YJ, Zhang QY, Bilsborrow K, Leslie M, Suhandynata RT, Zhou H. Sequence specificity of an essential nuclear localization sequence in Mcm3. bioRxiv [Preprint]. 2024 Nov 14:2024.11.14.623588. PMID: 39605614
It is always a special occasion for graduate students to have their first leading-author publications, Vivian and Ziyi managed to accomplish this feat early in their graduate studies. This is just the beginning of their productive careers!
Congratulations to Vivian for her first paper as a leading author and graduate student, see: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.26.605382v1.
Although untargeted MS has been used for decades as a discovery tool, there is a pressing need for accurate and robust quantification of cellular proteins. The new CASA technology that Vivian developed addresses a long standing bottleneck in protein quantification and opens the door to the the use of targeted MS for protein analysis in cell biology.
Now, Ziyi can focus all her attentions on exciting experiments!
It took a while, but the Mif2 work by Dr. Hinshaw and my team is finally published. There is no question that Mif2 plays a key role in kinetochore assembly and we are starting to learn more about it.
For being awarded the first Pfizer Oncology-Cell Signaling SD Graduate Fellowship, this is well deserved. We greatly appreciate Pfizer for its strong and generous support of basic science as the engine to drive impactful medical advances.
For years, it has been unclear how genetic defects in the SUMO pathway may cause enormous chromosomal translocations, and this question has captured our attention. Our latest work provided the first clue, suggesting that SUMO modification of MCM controls its origin-bound levels. This finding is both surprising and exciting, and it provided an elegant explanation for the cause of chromosomal translocations - reduced MCM loading at DNA replication origins may cause incomplete DNA replication, leading to broken and un-replicated DNA, the precursor of chromosomal translocations.
Congratulations to Alex, Qian and Vivian, future Ph.D. candidates. They are ready for the hard work and fun in the graduate school.
With our collaborator Stephen, a new insight into how the inner kinetochore assembly is controlled!
See: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.04.467375v1.full.pdf
for winning a poster prize at the 2021 SoCal Genome Stability Symposium!
