PhD Thesis Work

I completed my PhD thesis work in the Campbell lab at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where we studied mammalian mechanisms of DNA Damage Recognition and Repair. My work in particular was focused on a form of DNA damage called the DNA-Protein Crosslink, or DPC. DPCs are large, bulky, cytotoxic lesions that form when proteins become covalently and irreversibly attached to DNA. While it is known that DPCs are subject to multiple DNA repair pathways, including Nucleotide Excision Repair (NER) and Homologous Recombination (HR), the mechanism of orchestration of DPC repair is not well understood. My work focused on studying the role of ubiquitin and the proteasome in DPC repair, and culminated in the development of a novel, detailed model for how differential polyubiquitination modulates DPC repair by NER and HR. This work has been described in my thesis dissertation, which has can be found here, and in a manuscript that has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing reviewer-recommended revisions. I can’t wait to publish this manuscript and display it here on my website!