Investigating the functional impacts of cancer mutations
Cancer is a complex set of genetic diseases, and a single tumor can harbor an estimated 10-100 mutations. Many of these mutations are missense mutations, which cause a single amino acid change in a given protein. Unlike more severe mutations, such as deletions or insertions, it is difficult to predict how missense mutations affect a given protein’s function. With this challenge in mind, the goal of my research program is to explore how missense mutations observed in human tumors affect the function of proteins. This work is currently focused on the transcriptional coactivator p300 and the DNA damage response protein Mre11.