Genome Stability

Dr. Igor Kovalchuk is the Principle Investigator in the Plant Biotechnology laboratory at the University of Lethbridge. His lab studies genetic and epigenetic regulation of plant response to stress as well as develops various methods for improvement of plant transformation. He is particularly interested in the transgenerational effects of stress and microevolution of plant stress tolerance/resistance.He has substantial expertise in plant stress tolerance and plant transgenesis. Dr. Olga Kovalchuk is the Principle Investigator of the Human Epigenetics laboratory at the University of Lethbridge. Her lab studies the role of epigenetic dysregulation in carcinogenesis, epigenetic regulation of the cancer treatment responses, radiation epigenetics and the role of epigenetic changes in genome stability and carcinogenesis, radiation-induced oncogenic signaling, and radiation-induced DNA damage, repair, and recombination.

1. Genome stability – an evolutionary perspective Igor Kovalchuk

I. Genome Instability of Viruses

2. Genetic Instability of RNA Viruses John N. Barr and Rachel Fearns 3. Genome instability in DNA viruses Rafael Sanjuán, Marianoel Pereira-Gómez, Jennifer Risso

II. Genome instability in Bacteria and Archaea

4. Genome instability in bacteria and archaea: Strategies for maintaining genome stability Jan-Erik Messling and Ashley B. Williams

5. Genome instability in bacteria: causes and consequences Ashley B. Williams

6. CRISPR - bacteria immune system Andrey Golubov

III. Genome Stability of Unicellular Eukaryotes

7. Programmed DNA rearrangement in ciliates Franziska Jönsson

8. Homologous Recombination and Non-homologous End-joining repair in yeast Rebecca E. Jones and Timothy C. Humphrey

IV. Genome stability in multicellular eukaryotes

9. Meiotic and Mitotic Recombination: First in Flies Julie Korda Holsclaw, Talia Hatkevich and  Jeff Sekelsky

10. Genome stability in Drosophila – mismatch repair and genome stability Tomoe Negishi

11. Genome stability in Caenorhabditis elegans Matthias Rieckher, Amanda Franqueira C. Lopes and Björn Schumacher

12. Genetic Engineering of Plants using Zn-fingers, TALENs and CRISPRs Andriy Bilichak and Francois Eudes

13. Plant Genome Stability – General Mechanisms Andriy Bilichak

V. Genome stability in mammals

14. Cell cycle control and DNA damage signalling in mammals Valenti Gomez and Alexander Hergovich

15. The role of p53/p21/p16 in DNA damage signalling and DNA repair Yavuz Kulaberoglu, Ramazan Gundogdu, and Alexander Hergovich

16. Roles of RAD18 in DNA Replication and Post-Replication Repair (PRR) Cyrus Vaziri, Satoshi Tateishi, Liz Mutter-Rottmayer and Yanzhe Gao

17. Base Excision Repair and Nucleotide Excision Repair Tadahide Izumi and Isabel Mellon

18. DNA Mismatch Repair in Mammals Mingzhang Yang and Peggy Hsieh

19. Repair of double strand breaks by non-homologous end joining; its components and their function Patryk Moskwa

20. Double-Strand Break Repair: Homologous Recombination in Mammalian Cells Camille Gelot, Tangui Le-Guen, Sandrine Ragu and Bernard S. Lopez

21. Telomere maintenance and genome stability Wilnelly Hernandez-Sanchez, Mengyuan Xu and Derek J. Taylor

22. The relationship between checkpoint adaptation and mitotic catastrophe in genomic changes in cancer cells Lucy H. Swift and Roy M. Golsteyn

23. Chromatin, nuclear organization and genome stability in mammals Lora Boteva, Nick Gilbert

24. Role of DNA methylation in genome stability Dan Zhou and Keith D. Robertson

25. Non-coding RNAs in genome integrity Igor Kovalchuk

VI. Human diseases associated with genome instability 26. Human diseases associated with genome instability Bruno César Feltes, Joice de Faria Poloni, Kendi Nishino Miyamoto and Diego Bonatto

27. Cancer and genomic instability Wei Wei, Yabin Cheng and Bo Wang

28. Chromatin Modifications in DNA Repair and Cancer Margaret Renaud-Young, Karl Riabowol and Jennifer Cobb

29. Genomic Instability and Aging – Causes and Consequences Corinne Sidler

30. Nucleolar contributions to DNA damage response and genomic (in)stability in the nervous system Michal Hetman

VII. Effect of environment on genome stability

31. Diet and nutrition Lynnette R. Ferguson

32. Chemical mutagenesis

33. Environmental sources of ionizing radiation and their health consequences Aaron A. Goodarzi, Alexander Anikin, Dustin D. Pearson

Section VIII. Bystander and transgenerational effects – epigenetic perspective

34. Epigenetics of transgenerational genome instability in mammals

35. Genomic Instability and the Spectrum of Response to Low Radiation Doses Carmel Mothersill and Colin Seymour

36. Transgenerational genome instability in plants Igor Kovalchuk

37. Methods for the detection of DNA damage Denis V. Firsanov, Ljudmila V. Solovjeva, Vyacheslav M. Mikhailov, Maria P. Svetlova

38. Conserved and divergent features of DNA repair. Future perspectives in genome instability research Igor Kovalchuk