Cancer Research Data Meeting
Each year, all students within the Tumor Biology PhD program are required to give a seminar in which they present their data and answer questions about their work.
About This Week’s Presentation
Title: “Noncoding Genome and Disordered Proteome: Two Biological Dark Matters in Cancer and Gene Control”
Speaker: Sreejith Nair, PhD, Assistant Professor, Oncology, Georgetown Lombardi
Dr. Sreejith Nair received his doctoral degree from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and completed his postdoctoral research from the University of California San Diego. His lab is broadly interested in the regulatory mechanisms of eukaryotic gene expression, nuclear organization, and how the disruption in these cellular processes results in cancer, endocrine dysfunctions, and other disease states.
At one point in our life, all of us were single-cell organisms. How that single-cell evolved into a fully developed living being with complex phenotypes and hundreds of cell types is a fascinating question that is just beginning to be understood. This cellular evolution, phenotypic variations, and also a significant fraction of disease conditions are contributed by (i) variations encoded at the level of DNA, (ii) variations in reading genomic information, (iii) novel alterations in the genome through errors in copying the information or environmental factors. Our lab is curious about all these aspects of eukaryotic genome biology.
At a practical level, we focus on understanding the molecular mechanisms by which cellular identities are determined both during normal developmental programs and in cancer. We also study how the environmental and hormonal stimuli precisely turn on and turn off specific sets of genes. We hypothesize that gene regulation involves not only individual transcription factors and co-factors but a variety of nuclear organelles and macromolecules. We use multidisciplinary approaches involving genomic, proteomic, genome engineering, microscopic, and computational strategies to explore eukaryotic gene regulation and epigenetic basis of cancer development and therapeutic resistance