Grant: Operating Grant

The genetic material in our cells consists in extremely long and linear structures called chromosomes. It is of vital importance that these linear entities are passed on unchanged from one cell to the next; any cases of alterations may cause a change in the behavior of the cells, quite often in a way that leads to cancer. In addition, we now know that a number of human genetic diseases as well as some premature aging syndromes are a consequence of such unwarranted and too frequent chromosomal changes. Therefore, research in our laboratory is aimed at understanding how cells do maintain these linear chromosomes in a stable fashion. This mentioned linearity in fact also implies that chromosomes do have ends, and as with the ends of shoelaces, chromosome ends need a special protective cap. If this protective cap fails, the genetic material next to it will be damaged or lost, with potentially dire consequences as mentioned above. The proposed experiments here use traditional as well as modern genetic and biochemical experiments to investigate the functioning of these caps. Because some of the projects goals are impossible or too expensive to achieve using human cells, we will use a simple yeast cell system. Nevertheless and as has been the case in the past, we expect our findings to be relevant to the functioning of these caps in human cells as well. Thus, the anticipated results may open unique and new opportunities for developing anti-cancer approaches.