Research interests

  Genes of the cyclin D family are important in regulating G1 to S phase of the cell cycle, and also play a role in cell differentiation.  Genes of this family have been shown to be mis-expressed in various cancers and in neurodegenerative diseases.  Dissecting the regulatory architecture that controls the function of cyclin D in S. purpuratus, which as a deuterostome, is in the same evolutionary lineage as humans, would therefore be useful from a developmental and health standpoint.  To accomplish this, in the lab of Dr. James Coffman, at Mount Desert Island Biological Lab, we are utilizing cis-regulatory analysis, that is incorporting regions of sequence conservation that also contain other regions of interest, such as transcription factor cluster sites, into  reporter vectors and testing the spatial-temporal expression pattern of each.  Mutagenesis is being performed on sub-elements, such as binding sites for particular transcription factors, within each region to determine the role of each in mediating cyclin D expression.

Publications

• Gundersen RE, You J, Rauch S, Farnham K, McCarty C, Willis N, Prince A. 2005. Loss-of-function mutations identified in the helical domain of the G protein ?-subunit, G?2, of Dictyostelium discoideum. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta. 1722: 262-270

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