Galia Debelouchina
University of California-San Diego, CA·Biophysics
Inside every cell, DNA is packaged with proteins into chromatin, and parts of that package are shut down so the genes within them stay silent. This silencing, which happens in dense regions called heterochromatin, is essential for cells to specialize during development.
- Fields
Biophysics
Chemistry
Biochemistry
- Topics
chromatin
gene silencing
liquid-liquid phase separation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2030
What they work on
- Determine how heterochromatin protein 1 (HP1), a protein family central to gene silencing, interacts with itself, with chromatin and with partner proteins to set the material properties of heterochromatin compartments.
- Test the idea that heterochromatin forms by liquid-liquid phase separation into droplet-like compartments, using solid-state NMR spectroscopy together with chemical biology, cell biology and computational tools.
- Develop NMR approaches tailored to dynamic, heterogeneous biological assemblies such as the condensates formed by HP1 proteins.
- Implement targeted dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) to selectively amplify one protein's NMR signal above the cellular background, and use it to study protein-membrane interactions in whole bacterial and mammalian cells.
More about the research
Studying such assemblies is hard because they are large, floppy and constantly changing, and because most structural methods require purified samples rather than living cells. The lab develops structural biology methods for exactly these cases and then pushes them into the cellular environment, pairing solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, which reads atomic-scale structure from magnetic signals of atomic nuclei, with chemical biology tools for building and labeling proteins.
Why it matters
Methods that reveal atomic structure inside intact cells would let researchers see proteins as they actually behave in their native surroundings rather than in a test tube. Applied to heterochromatin and to proteins that bind membranes, this could clarify how genes are switched off during normal development and how these interactions go wrong, informing understanding of the molecular origins of disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Lalit Deshmukh
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David Eliezer
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Biophysics
Determine the structure of a membrane-induced toxic tau oligomer, a small clump of the Alzheimer's-linked protein tau that forms on membranes, using solid-state NMR and ESR spectroscopy.
The school
University of California-San Diego: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 637 research doctorates a year.
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