Dr. Grant Brown

Avoiding catastrophe: Yeast study reveals clues to maintaining genome size

11 June 2018|

By Jovana Drinjakovic

Study reveals an unexpected role for a well- known protein machinery in maintaining the correct DNA content with implications for cancer and other diseases

As cells divide, they must accurately split their DNA between the two daughter cells or risk having an uneven number of chromosomes which can lead to developmental disorders and cancer. A new Donnelly Centre study uncovers how a […]

Quantification of the yeast proteome

19 January 2018|

The Brown lab, together with Anastasia Baryshnikova at Calico Labs, used computational analyses to normalize and convert 21 yeast protein abundance studies to the intuitive measurement of molecules per cell. They provide precise and accurate abundance measurements for greater than 90% of yeast proteins, making it the most comprehensive quantitation of the yeast proteome, and any eukaryotic cell, to date.

With this unified dataset in hand, comparative and multivariate outlier […]

How RNA decay promotes transcriptional rewiring during DNA replication stress

13 December 2017|

Raphael Loll-Krippleber from the Brown lab describes how yeast cells exposed to DNA replication stress induced by the anti-cancer drug hydroxyurea use RNA decay to reprogram gene expression. Using complementary functional genomics approaches Raphael found that a specific mRNA encoding the transcriptional repressor Yox1 is degraded at P-bodies sites to prevent accumulation of the Yox1 repressor in the nucleus. Up-regulation of YOX1 expression, as observed when P-body function is […]

SLx4 complexes from EMBO Journal article

PhD student Attila Balint discovers signaling role for Slx4

9 July 2015|

Slx4 is a nuclease scaffold protein that is mutated in Fanconi Anemia patients. In his study, published in the EMBO Journal, Attila and colleagues in Grant Brown’s lab defined the pathway that assembles Slx4 protein complexes onto chromatin when DNA replication is blocked by DNA damaging drugs. Surprisingly, Slx4 complexes promote checkpoint signaling to allow cells to resist and repair DNA damage. Attila’s study, funded by […]