Deanna Koepp

My laboratory investigates the regulation of cell cycle progression and genomic stability. Maintenance of genomic integrity is required for cellular viability and proliferation. As cells proliferate, chromosomes must be precisely duplicated and accurately segregated to prevent loss or inappropriate amplification of genetic information. Chromosomal instability and copy number alterations are frequently observed in cancer cells and are thought to contribute to tumorigenesis. Thus, even under optimal conditions, cell cycle progression is highly regulated. Moreover, eukaryotes have developed checkpoint pathways that monitor progress during cell division so that in the event of an error, the checkpoint is activated to block the cell cycle and activate repair pathways. Both cell cycle progression and checkpoint pathways are highly conserved from single-cell eukaryotes to multi-cellular organisms. A major focus of our work is aimed at understanding how ubiquitin-mediated degradation contributes to genomic stability via cell cycle and checkpoint pathways. Of particular interest is the F-box protein Dia2, which functions as part of an SCF ubiquitin ligase to regulate DNA replication and recovery from the replication checkpoint.