Welcome to the Laboratory of

Elizaveta Benevolenskaya

at the

University of Illinois at Chicago

The thought that one might understand mechanistically how cells decide whether to continue to proliferate or to differentiate has always been dreamlike to me.  Cells that undergo uncontrolled proliferation or maintain poorly differentiated state predispose individuals to cancer.  The knowledge of the critical molecular events that control the operating signal transduction pathways is necessary to understand cancer development.  Yet, recent advances in molecular and computational biology have made possible to study, genome-wide, transcriptional regulatory networks, and availability of knockdown techniques reveals their relevance to cell growth and allows to put them in hierarchical order.  By using both traditional methods and high-throughput approaches, we are studying mechanisms that orchestrate initiation and progression of differentiation.

My research plans will be aimed on understanding of how, by positive or negative regulation of transcription, RBP2 and other pRB-interacting proteins affect differentiation.  These studies will shed some light on how pRB cooperates with cell-fate determining transcription factors, which is a very poorly understood tumor suppressor function of pRB.  If we reach global understanding of the central effectors of pRB involved in transcriptional regulatory interactions, we will know how to manipulate it to treat cancer.