Speaker: Lilian Kabeche, assistant professor in molecular biophysics and biochemistry in the Yale Cancer Biology Institute at Yale University

Title: "Old pathway new functions: redefining how the DNA damage response pathway maintains genome stability"

Abstract: Although genome instability (GIN) is often deleterious to cell growth, in cancer, it is associated with increased drug resistance, metastasis and immune evasion, which contribute to poor patient prognosis. As a postdoctoral fellow, I discovered that ATR kinase, a master regulator of the DNA damage response (DDR) pathway, promotes faithful chromosome segregation through a mitosis-specific pathway. This breakthrough changed how we think about the DDR, as it was previously believed that ATR only functioned in interphase in response to DNA damage. This unexpected role for ATR opened many opportunities to understand the crosstalk between the pathways that prevent GIN. In this talk, I will delve into some of our novel data demonstrating that basal ATR is necessary for centromere function and promotes the rupture of micronuclei, smaller nuclei that are formed as a consequence of mis-segregation errors, as mechanisms to prevent GIN independent of its DDR function.

Host: GDCB Associate Professor Marna Yandeau-Nelson and Vaishali Todi, GDCB graduate student in Gupta Lab

Kabeche Lab: https://kabechelab.com/