Nakamura Lab Research Publications Members

Welcome to the Nakamura lab web page! Thank you for visiting the Nakamura lab web site at University of Illinois at Chicago. Our laboratory is interested in understanding how checkpoint and DNA repair proteins contribute to maintenance of telomeres, the natural ends of linear eukaryotic chromosomes. Proper maintenance of telomeres is crucial for stable inheritance of the genome. Various checkpoint and DNA repair proteins, including evolutionarily highly conserved checkpoint kinases Tel1 (ATM) and Rad3 (ATR), play important roles in stable maintenance of telomeres. Our major goal is to provide mechanistic understandings for the roles of various checkpoint and DNA repair proteins in telomere maintenance. Deregulation of telomere maintenance mechanisms has been found to be a key event in tumorigenesis, thus mechanistic insights on how various proteins collaborate to generate functional telomeres might lead to effective methods for preventing cancer. We use fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe as a model system. Advantages of S. pombe include well-characterized DNA damage responses with high structural and functional conservation to mammalian cells, and amenability to genetic, biochemical and cytological studies. Toru M. Nakamura November 20, 2011 Our lab is located at:

University of Illinois at Chicago Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics 900 S. Ashland (M/C 669) Chicago, IL 60607 USA [Google Map] Lab Tel: 312-413-5084

Principal Investigator Toru M. Nakamura, Ph.D. Tel: 312-996-1988 Fax: 312-413-0353 E-mail: