CAA: Protein Folding in Yeast/Gene Silencing in Bacteria

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Lopilato 9629780 To update the research skills of Dr. Lopilato, this Career Advancement award is provided. A six month sabbatical is being taken in a yeast Molecular Biology research laboratory at Dana Farber Cancer Institute (Boston, MA), followed by six months with a reduced teaching load at the home institution, in order to apply those skills to research in her laboratory. Both the scope and effectiveness of the her research will be expanded by employing new techniques and approaches to problems that have been under study in her laboratory for the past few years. Participating in a research project at an institution where research is the primary activity will allow her to have time to focus her energies on increasing her research productivity and potential. In order to progress in her work on gene silencing in bacteria, Dr. Lopilato will benefit from new ways of approaching projects. She will be studying protein folding in yeast during the first six months of the sabbatical, which is a clear expansion of her research interests. In particular, she will be exploiting two types of genetic interactions, namely synthetic lethal interactions and suppressor analysis, to detect and identify proteins involved in protein folding in the endoplasmic reticulum of yeast cells. These approaches will be directly applied to her own research during the second six months of the sabbatical, and hopefully, will lead to identifying new proteins which are involved in gene silencing. A specific skill that she will gain while at the research institution is DNA amplification using polymerase chain reaction, which will be incorporated immediately into her research and into the courses that she teaches. The activities that will advance her research include the genetic and molecular approaches described above and cell biology approaches such as protein tagging and localization techniques. All of these methods and approaches will enhance her ability to pursue research projects and maintain an active research l aboratory at Simmons College, an undergraduate college where both teaching and faculty research are high priorities.