My Research

The research that I have been doing during the year is a lot different from the type of research that I'll be doing during the summer. My original project studies the effects of a combination of different cancer drugs on breast cancer cells. I have so far tested two drugs in combination with each other. The first is called Cisplatin, which is a very common chemotherapy drug that has been used since the late seventies. It causes DNA damage by binding to DNA and interfering with how cells divide. The other class of drug I am using in called an HDAC inhibitor. HDAC inhibitors cause proteins called histone deactylase (HDACs) to become inactivated. In a normal cell, HDAC proteins make the DNA less accessible so that genes can’t be easily transcribed into proteins. We hope that by inhibiting HDAC proteins, we can make the DNA more accessible and more susceptible to DNA damage by drugs such as cisplatin. Our initial results show that HDAC inhibitors increase sensitivity to cisplatin when the combination of both drugs is used. 

The main project that I’ll be working on deals with the structure of DNA during the time when cells divide, which is called mitosis. During normal cellular life, the DNA is relatively relaxed and DNA is being used to make proteins. During mitosis however, the DNA becomes very condensed. When it becomes condensed, DNA loses several of the biological markers that are used to mark where genes are being transcribed. However, it was previously unknown how cells remember which genes were being used to make proteins and which genes were inactive. My project studies the how cells remember/bookmark which genes were being made to make proteins and the mechanism behind it.

The project was mostly finished by a grad student (now Ph.D.) who worked in our lab but has now left. My job is to confirm her results by using a procedure called chromatin affinity purification (ChAP). This allows us to purify certain parts of DNA to determine what kind of bookmarks there may or may not be. I’ll probably go into this more in another post if I feel like it. But first, I have to write a new protocol based on our old lab protocol since the ChAP I’ll be doing is a little bit different.