Dent Lab



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Lab Interests
Welcome to our lab at U.T. - M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. The lab is supervised by Dr. Sharon Y. R. Dent, Ph.D. in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. We are located on the 9th floor of the Mitchell Basic Sciences Research Building.

Our lab studies the role of chromatin and chromatin modifying proteins in regulating gene expression. We use a variety of model systems to address the above question including; Saccharomyces cerevesiae, mouse models, embryonic stem (ES) cells, and various tissue culture cell lines.

Current projects
Yeast: Genetic and biochemical approaches to decipher the means of chromatin organization and transcriptional repression by the Ssn6-Tup1 repressor complex. Similar approaches to understand the possible crosstalk between various histone modifying enzymes.

Mouse: Gene targeting and transgenic approaches to understand the functions of histone acetyltransferases (GCN5 and PCAF) during mammalian development.

Tissue culture/cell lines: Projects involve transfection, chromatin immunoprecipitation, and biochemical approaches to examine the mechanisms of histone modifying proteins and their interaction with other transcriptional regulators.