The Cook Lab at UNC 

What do we want to know? How is the human cell division cycle organized and regulated? How are the major transitions in the cell division cycle controlled, and how might disruptions in that control affect proliferation and genome stability? How do the key proteins in the earliest steps of DNA replication function, and which proteins are their partners and regulators?  How do signaling pathways that control cell cycle progression  (both intracellular and extracellular) affect DNA replication control and genome stability?  Follow the link for “Research” to read more detailed background information.

Why do we care? 

We are intensely curious about the eukaryotic cell cycle and how it is coordinated such that the chromosomes are fully duplicated only at the appropriate time and then segregated to the two daughter cells.  We wonder how cells manage to ensure that replication doesn’t occur under inappropriate circumstances, and how cell proliferation is controlled during development and maintenance of an adult organism. It's becoming increasingly clear that cancer cells initiate DNA replication inappropriately and furthermore, that they do a "sloppy" job of precisely duplicating and segregating their genomes. On the flipside, we want to know how cells ensure that cell cycle transitions are efficient so that appropriate proliferation can replace damaged or old cells. We seek to determine how the cell cycle is normally controlled and how that control is altered during normal developmental transitions or is disrupted in disease. 

How do we figure it out? 

We use a combination of cell biology, molecular biology, genetics, and biochemistry, and we make extensive use of single cell quantitative live and fixed cell analyses.  We use cultured human cells (both cancer cell lines and normal cells) and manipulate the proteins and signaling activities in those cells with genetic and pharmacological strategies. We measure protein abundance, chromatin localization, cell cycle progression, replication activity, protein-protein interactions, etc…   We have active collaborations with many other cell cycle and DNA metabolism labs both at UNC and at other institutions.

Follow the link for “Publications” to run an automatic search for all the lab’s papers in PubMed. 

contact Dr. Jean Cook by email at jean_cook[AT]med.unc.edu (replace "at" with @)