The National Institutes of Health has awarded Dr. Yong-jie Xu, faculty in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department, a 5 year grant worth $1.295 Million to study Signaling Mechanism of the DNA Replication Checkpoint.
Located in the Diggs Research Laboratory Building, Dr. Xu's laboratory is interested in understanding the molecular mechanism of the replication checkpoint, a complex signaling pathway that is activated when DNA replication is perturbed. The long-term goal of the research program is to better understand the molecular interface between the DNA replication machinery and the checkpoint pathway in order to provide insights into how the checkpoint signaling is initiated at the perturbed replication forks and how perturbed forks are stabilized under stress, the two most prominent questions in the field. Progress in the study of the checkpoint signaling mechanism will ultimately advance our knowledge of how genome integrity is maintained and how it can be disrupted in all eukaryotic cells. It may also have implications to an improvement of chemotherapy designed to interfere with the DNA replication or the replication checkpoint in tumor cells.
