Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics

Author: Nicholas Caito

All Research / Greenberg Lab

Spotlight on Research – Greenberg Lab

The Greenberg Lab focuses on how cytoskeletal motors function in both health and disease. Currently, the lab is studying mutations that cause familial cardiomyopathies, the leading cause of sudden cardiac death in people under 30 years old. The lab uses an array of biochemical, biophysical, and cell biological techniques to decipher how these mutations affect heart contraction from the level of single molecules to the level of engineered tissues. Insights into the disease pathogenesis will guide efforts to develop novel therapies.

2018 News / All News

Congratulations to Paige Cloonan!

Congratulations to Paige Cloonan (pictured, on the left), an undergraduate researcher in Michael Greenberg’s lab, for winning the Undergraduate Poster Award Competition at the 2018 Biophysical Society Meeting.

Paige is currently in her fourth year, majoring in Biomedical Engineering. The winning poster was entitled “Mechanical and Structural Analysis of Cardiomyopathies at the Single Cell Level”.

All Research / Cooper Lab

Spotlight on Research – Cooper Lab

The Cooper Lab is interested in how the actin filaments in cells assemble and how that assembly controls cell shape and movement. One focus is an actin-binding protein called “capping protein,” which caps one end of the actin filament. Capping protein is in turn regulated by intrinsically disordered regions of the CARMIL family of proteins, which exhibit positive linkage in their binding interactions.

All Research / Galburt Lab

Spotlight on Research – Galburt Lab

The Galburt Lab strives to understand the physical mechanisms of transcription initiation and other important DNA-protein interactions. More specifically, we use a variety of single-molecule and ensemble biophysical techniques including both optical and magnetic tweezers and fluorescent microscopy to investigate how the assembly of initiation complexes on gene promoters leads to DNA unwinding and transcription. Our work is currently focused on the mechanisms of basal transcription initiation in Eukaryotes and on factor-regulated transcription in Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

All Research / Burgers Lab

Spotlight on Research – Burgers Lab

The Burgers Lab studies DNA replication and DNA damage response in eukaryotic cells. Using yeast as a model organism, the lab integrates the biochemical analysis of DNA-protein interactions in purified model systems with the genetic analysis of targeted yeast mutants. Specific areas of interest are lagging strand DNA replication and Okazaki fragment maturation, damage induced mutagenesis, and DNA damage cell cycle checkpoints.


DNA replication fork and Okazaki fragment maturation

All Research / Lohman Lab

Spotlight on Research – Lohman Lab

Research in the Lohman Lab focuses on obtaining a molecular understanding of the mechanisms of protein-nucleic acid interactions involved in DNA metabolism, in particular, DNA motor proteins (helicases/translocases) and single stranded DNA binding proteins. Thermodynamic, kinetic, structural and single molecule approaches are used to probe these interactions at the molecular level.