Turker Lab
Lab Members
Cristian Dan, Senior Research Assistant, joined the lab in October 2005. He received his B.S. in Molecular Biology from Portland State University.
email: danc@ohsu.edu
Brad Eckelmann, Research Assistant I, joined the lab in July 2011. He graduated in 2011 from Carleton College with a B.A. in Physics.
email:
Dmytro Grygoryev, received his PhD in 1997. He joined the Turker lab as a Research Associate in 2009.
email: grygorye@ohsu.edu
Anna Ohlrich, Research Assistant II, graduated with her B.A. in biology from Reed College in 2010. She joined the lab in July of 2011.
email: ohlrich@ohsu.edu
RESEARCH INTERESTS
I am interested in the mechanisms of abnormal gene inactivation and the relevance of these events to cancer. Abnormal gene inactivation results from two distinct types of events. The first is DNA mutation, which represents a change in the structure of DNA that alters expression of a given gene. The second type of event is epigenetic silencing, which involves loss of gene expression without alteration of the gene sequence. With regards to mutational events, we are interested in both endogenous and exogenous genotoxins that can affect the frequency and types of mutations that occur within the animal. A current focus is on how accelerated particles in space cause large-scale genomic damage that could affect astronauts during prolonged space travel. Our work with epigenetic silencing focuses on how silencing is initiated and determining the pathways that cause active genes to become aberrantly turned off.
