Anja-Katrin Bielinsky

BIOGRAPHY

ACADEMIC POSITIONS:
• Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics
• Director of the Genetic Mechanisms of Cancer Program at the Masonic Cancer Center of the U of M

EDUCATION:
• PhD in Immunology from the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany
• Post-doctoral fellow at Brown University, RI, USA

REASEARCH:
The Bielinsky laboratory studies biological pathways at the interface of DNA replication and repair. Specifically, we are trying to delineate how certain types of DNA damage that occur at replication forks are recognized and elicit a S phase checkpoint response. The S phase checkpoint is evolutionarily highly conserved and has gained importance in cancer biology because it provides an early barrier against tumorigenesis. The S phase checkpoint is part of a larger network that maintains genome stability, but how certain genes and processes feed into this network is not well understood. The relevance of this genome stability network is further emphasized by the fact that mutations in human homologs of yeast genes operating in this network are known to cause diseases that predispose individuals to cancer, such as Li Fraumeni syndrome, ataxia telangiectasia or Bloom, Werner and Rothmund Thomson syndromes. Most of our studies focus on budding yeast but we have started to implement human tissue culture cells into our research, because one major objective of ours is to assess whether the specific pathways we identify in yeast are conserved in humans. We further believe that identifying and characterizing the genes and proteins involved in genome stability pathways will provide mechanistic insight into how cells avoid DNA damage during DNA replication and thus shield themselves from becoming abnormal. This in turn may have diagnostic and therapeutic applications in the treatment of cancer.


HOME PAGE
http://www.cancer.umn.edu/research/profiles/bielinsky.html