Thank you for visiting the Nakamura lab web site at Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, College of Medicine, University of Illinois at Chicago!

Our laboratory is interested in understanding regulation of telomeres, the natural ends of linear eukaryotic chromosomes. Proper maintenance of telomeres is crucial for stable inheritance of the genome.

Deregulation of telomere maintenance mechanisms has been found to be a key event in tumorigenesis, thus mechanistic insights on how various proteins collaborate to generate functional telomeres might lead to effective methods for preventing cancer.

We use fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe as a model system. Advantages of S. pombe include well-characterized DNA damage responses with high structural and functional conservation to mammalian cells, and amenability to genetic, biochemical and cytological studies.