I'm thrilled to see the cover of NatureStructMolBiol this month! My sibling Leidy Churchman made this special painting to illustrate our latest work on the packaging of mitochondrial DNA. Both works are nicely described in the "Musings on art and science" editorial nature.com/articles/s4159…

⚠️ Mitotic chromosomes are self-entangled and disentangle through a topoisomerase-II-dependent two-stage exit from mitosis Molecular Cell 84, 1–20 (April 2024) sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Over the past few years my lab has developed new uses for reversible replication barriers in vitro. Emma Grogan and Tata Kavlashvili outline our most up to date protocols in Nature Protocols. We hope the community finds this resource useful! 🧬🚦 nature.com/articles/s4159…

Happy to share my and ⁦Emma Grogan⁩’s work in ⁦Dewar Lab⁩ out in ⁦Nature Protocols today!⁩ We describe the use of reversible replication barriers to study DNA replication & repair in vitro! 🐸🧬 nature.com/articles/s4159…

Our article on human cis- and trans- gene regulatory evolution is out! TLDR; trans-environment impacts the functional genome divergence between species. Cis-DNA doesn't work alone. Objectively cool and incredible scientists made this— @hansen_tylerj, The Hodges Lab & Capra Lab

#NewNProt: A reversible LacR replication barrier to understand the mechanisms of #DNAsynthesis bit.ly/4cQw2Im Emma Grogan Tata Kavlashvili James Dewar

You can find the paper here cell.com/molecular-cell…

So lucky to be a Damon Runyon-Timmerman Traverse fellow! Inspirational people joined by an incredible mission.

To everyone who’s still not quite sure what is happening in 🇬🇪 right now, and why the events unfolding on the ground are truly unprecedented, or why the struggles of the Georgian people should even matter to those in Western capitals, here’s a (belated) not-so-short recap 🧵

Mark your calendars for next week's dissertation defense! Jessica Taylor of the Breann Brown lab will present her thesis work on Tuesday, May 14th!

Both embankments of the river are filled with people marching towards the Europe Square. #NoToRussianLaw #GeorgiaProtests Photo not mine

Both embankments in Tbilisi are filled with people headed to Europe Square. 📷 RFE/RL #NoToRussianLaw #GeorgiaProtests

The Cortez lab (lab.vanderbilt.edu/cortez-lab/) is looking for new postdocs or senior scientists. If you are interested in genome stability, replication, DNA repair, or DNA damage responses please send me an email.

After participating in 3 rounds of grant review for ACS Research I’ve noticed a few recurring issues with grants and postdoc fellowships. I put together a Tweetorial (my first!) highlighting common problems. See 🧵for more info!

It was a pleasure to write this The EMBO Journal news and views about two wonderful papers from Tom Deegan and Karim Labib: embopress.org/doi/full/10.10… I highly recommend these papers. Thanks to @HVodermaier for the opportunity! 🫶🧪

Tissue temperatures become quite "hot" during inflammation and fever, yet temperature is rarely considered an experimental variable. Excited to share what happened when we turned up the heat on T cell immunometabolism. Thanks to all that contributed!! science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Excited to share our latest work published in nature, by grad student Mirazul Islam, currently on the job market. We uncovered clonal dynamics relating normal to tumor cells using natural and synthetic genetic changes. #SingleCell #DevBio #CRISPR #CRC #HTAN nature.com/articles/s4158…

In our latest preprint we analyzed how abasic (AP) sites affect DNA replication: - AP sites stall DNA synthesis ⛓️‍💥 - Leading APs stall replisomes but lagging APs don’t 🛑/✅ - TLS is crucial for bypass of both leading and lagging strand AP sites 🛠️🧬 biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Now online! Engineering mtDNA deletions by reconstituting end joining in human mitochondria dlvr.it/TJSkQW