Nuclear Architecture and Disease

我们实验室的目的是了解基因组在体内是如何组织的，以及这种组织如何促进基因组在健康和疾病中的功能。我们已经在几个领域取得了重大进展：我们已经扩展了我们早期的努力，开发成像方法来可视化活细胞中的基因组功能。特别是，我们开发了一个实验系统，使我们第一次能够可视化活细胞中断裂DNA区域的行为。我们已经使用这个系统来探测癌症染色体易位在完整细胞中发生的机制。我们也继续我们正在进行的工作，探索间期细胞核基因组的空间组织。我们开发了新的软件工具来分析空间基因组定位，并将其应用于分析正常细胞和癌细胞的基因组组织差异。最后，我们正在探索早衰疾病Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome （HGPS）的分子机制，特别是作为揭示衰老相关肿瘤形成过程的手段。我们正在探索高阶基因组组织在HGPS患者细胞中丢失的机制，我们正在研究HGPS患者和正常衰老过程中机体缺陷的分子基础。

The aim of our laboratory is to understand how genomes are organized in vivo and how this organization contributes to genome function in health and disease. We have made significant progress in several areas: We have extended our earlier efforts to develop imaging methods to visualize genome function in living cells. In particular, we have developed an experimental system which allows us for the first time to visualize the behavior of broken DNA regions in living cells. We have used this system to probe the mechanism by which cancer chromosome translocations occur in intact cells. We have also continued our ongoing work on exploring the spatial organization of the genome in the interphase cell nucleus. We have developed novel software tools to analyze spatial genome positioning and we have applied it to the analysis of genome organization differences in normal and cancer cells. Finally, we are exploring the molecular mechanisms of the premature aging disease Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS), in particular as a means to uncover the process of aging-related tumor formation. We are exploring the mechanism by which higher order genome organization is lost in HGPS patient cells and we are investigating the molecular basis for the organismal defects in HGPS patients and during normal aging.