Projects

Cancer is a disease of the genome, with both structural and numerical chromosomal aberrations, so called aneuploidy, occurring concomitantly in most tumors. Despite this co-occurrence, the advances in the characterization of point mutations and structural and numerical changes failed to provide an insight into a possible functional relationship between structural and whole chromosomal instability. Recently, novel evidence suggests that numerical chromosomal aberrations leads to delayed S phase ...

Replication stress is a key driver of genomic instability giving rise to human disease, for instance cancer or developmental disorders. It is caused by a variety of defects such as lesions blocking replication (e.g. DNA interstrand crosslinks) or processes that lead to the exhaustion of DNA precursors. This generates under-replicated DNA and replication intermediates that can be rescued by repair processes requiring homologous recombination between sister chromatids. Often, cells exposed to ...