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MCB Faculty Named Directors of LAS Graduate Programs
Professor Satish Nair of the Department of Biochemistry has been appointed Director of the Center for Biophysics and Quantitative Biology. Professor Nair has been serving as Interim Director since November 2015. Professor Martha Gillette of the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology has been...
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GPCRs Direct Germline Development and Somatic Gonad Function in Planarians
G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are the largest and most versatile family of cell-surface receptors. They play critical roles in various cellular and physiological systems and have emerged as a leading group of therapeutic targets. Due to their structural and functional conservation across...
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Force triggers gene expression by stretching chromatin
Professors Ning Wang and Andrew Belmont led a team that found the pathway by which physical forces drive gene expression in cells.
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Force triggers gene expression by stretching chromatin
Professors Ning Wang and Andrew Belmont led a team that found the pathway by which physical forces drive gene expression in cells.
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Graduate student Harini Iyer publishes two studies characterizing genes required for proper spermatogonial stem cell development.
In a study published in PLoS Genetics, graduate student Harini Iyer and colleagues show that the transcription factor Nuclear Factor Y-B (NF-YB) is required for SSC proliferation in planarians as well as in Schistosoma mansoni, a parasitic flatworm related to the free-living planarian and a...
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Martha Gillette and collaborators receive two grants to study the brain
Gillette, professor of cell and developmental biology, and colleagues will collaborate on various projects involving innovative single cell analysis in brain and the creation of biological machines in hopes of creating new diagnostic and therapeutic tools.
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University of Illinois awarded $8M from NIH to study nuclear structure
Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology and Principal Investigator Andrew Belmont from the University of Illinois heads a team of Investigators that has been awarded an $8M grant over five years to study nuclear structure from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund as part of the...
Andrew Belmont: Influencing a generation of chromatin biology
As a postdoc studying chromosomal structure with David Agard and John Sedat in the late 1980s, Andrew Belmont had observed intriguing ultrastructural details in interphase nuclei. “We’d see large-scale fibers about 100 nanometers thick, and then there’d be a 10- to 30-nanometer-thick fiber looping...
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An elegant study led by Sumanprava Giri, a graduate student in the lab of Dr. Supriya Prasanth, shows ORCA interacts with multiple repressive H3K9 lysine methyltransferases (KMTs), namely G9a/GLP and Suv39H1.
Origin Recognition Complex Associated (ORCA) organizes heterochromatin by assembling histone H3 lysine 9 methyltransferases on chromatin.
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Dr. Supriya Prasanth's lab identifies a BEN domain-containing protein as a novel transcriptional repressor of rRNA genes, in PNAS.
Prasanth and colleagues show that BEND3 directly binds to rDNA promoter in a sequence specific manner and induces chromatin modifications leading to a transcriptionally repressive chromatin environment.