What do we do?
Oncogenic transformation of cells caused by tumor-suppressor loss results in widespread reprogramming of cells. During this process significant changes in genomic content, transcription, translation and the proteome all work to sustain cancer cell development. The fundamental question that our lab is interested in investigating is: what are the mechanisms that allow cells control the translation of genes during tumorigenesis?
Our lab use many genome-wide “omics” based approaches to determine how: (A) the transcriptome changes in cancer cells and patient samples (RNA-SEQ), (B) RNA-binding proteins and miRNAs function to modulate the ribosome occupancy and protein levels of these genes (CLIP, PAR-CLIP, Ribosome profiling and proteomics), (C) these events are changed in tumor models and primary patient tumor samples and (D) CRISPR screening can be utilized to determine essential genes in many cancer types.