My name's Ben Stinson and the
microscope I work on is Chuck Norris.
Chuck Norris!
It's a little intimidating at first
to work on a microscope called Chuck Norris.
The joke is that you don't do
experiments on Chuck Norris,
Chuck Norris does experiments on you.
We look at double-strand break repair of
DNA, so sometimes DNA can be broken
completely in half, and we study a
process called non-homologous end joining,
which sounds complicated but,
very simply, it serves to take
the two DNA ends and join them back together.
When you have a double-strand break in
the DNA, this is highly toxic to the cell
and it has to be repaired in order for
the cell to survive. But if this repair
doesn't go as planned, you can end up
with changes in your DNA that can result
in things like cancer predisposition, so
it's important that we understand how
this works and how it's regulated.
What I'm particularly interested in is
looking at different protein nanomachines
that modify these DNA ends so
that they can actually be joined.
And so we use the microscope to directly
visualize each of the DNA ends as well
as the factors that are working on the
DNA ends so that they can be joined.
And in gene-editing, it actually requires the
purposeful introduction of a double-strand
break. And so we would like to
understand how that process works as
well to further inform those efforts.
Chuck Norris is a very nice
instrument and allows us
to observe some really cool things.
