The title of his talk is 'Cell biological mechanisms driving rapid evolution of genomes'
The mutational processes studied in David’s group are particularly important for cancer, but have relevance for genome evolution in other contexts.
Current projects from his group include: the mechanism of a newly discovered mutational process called “chromothripsis”, how the architecture and integrity of the nuclear envelope impacts genome maintenance, and the role of cytoplasmic chromatin in triggering innate immune proinflammatory signaling. His lab uses a variety of approaches which include, molecular genetics, biochemistry, and imaging. Currently there is a heavy emphasis on using a combination of live-cell imaging and single-cell genome sequencing developed in the lab (“Look-Seq”) to relate the consequences of cell division errors to genome altera9ons.
Here are some of the recent papers from his group:
Heritable transcriptioonal defects from aberra9ons of nuclear architecture. Papathanasiou S, Mynhier NA, Liu S, BruneQe G, Stokasimov E, Jacob E, Li L, Comenho C, van Steensel B, Buenrostro JD, Zhang CZ, Pellman D. Nature. 2023 Jul;619(7968):184-192
Breakage of cytoplasmic chromosomes by pathological DNA base excision repair. Tang S, Stokasimov E, Cui Y, Pellman D. Nature. 2022 Jun;606(7916):930-936.
Mechanisms generating cancer genome complexity from a single cell division error. Umbreit NT, Zhang CZ, Lynch LD, Blaine LJ, Cheng AM, Tourdot R, Sun L, Almubarak HF, Judge K, Mitchell TJ, Spektor A, Pellman D. Science. 2020 Apr 17;368(6488):eaba0712
Nuclear envelope assembly defects link mitoyic errors to chromothripsis. Liu S, Kwon M, Mannino M, Yang N, Renda F, Khodjakov A, Pellman D. Nature. 2018 Sep;561(7724):551-555.