Over the four billion years that life has evolved on this planet, organisms have acquired amazing phenotypes including natural programs of resistance to stress and disease. The molecular mechanisms underlying these traits are of keen interest in translational applications. That is, if we understand how an organism from the wild has met a challenge that humans face in the clinic, we can borrow the logic for ourselves. The goal of my lab is to accelerate the field’s progress toward this end, by developing methods and discovering principles for evolutionary genetics. We...
As an organism ages, its proteins face an increasing severity in the challenges they receive from extrinsic and intrinsic environmental perturbation. Chaperones become dysregulated, while the degradation machineries stop working properly. The protein accumulates damage and starts to misfold. At this point, the cell needs to mount a response to restore its homeostasis; however, the stress response machinery that it typically relies upon when faced with such challenges has lost its capacity to function.
This breakdown, however, does not lead to complete disorder....
Research in the Lewis laboratory focuses on mitochondria, the dynamic, double membrane bound organelle that is essential for oxidative phosphorylation. Specifically, our area of study is mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) synthesis and distribution within human cells. Mitochondria maintain their own multi-copy genome independent of the nucleus; the goals of my work are to understand how mtDNA copy number is regulated within and across cell cycles, and how the disruption of these pathways impinges on mtDNA integrity, cellular metabolism, and ultimately human health. Using...
