DNA is constantly under stress and exposed to harmful environmental, as well as internal, factors that can pose a threat to the overall stability and function. Evolution has led to repair pathways like BER, NER, and MMR to compensate for DNA damage entities such as DNA adducts. One of the ways DNA adducts can be further studies relies on urinary adductomics, which provides a noninvasive technique to build a connection between certain classes of DNA adducts and repair pathways in the cell.
Find more information about our research below. If you're interested on joining us, see here.
This project aims to determine the contributions of BER, NER, and the dNTP pool to the urinary DNA adductome for representative expected and unexpected adducts, via repair deficient mouse models.
DNA repair sources of extracellular 8-oxo-G and 8-oxoGua, NER, nucleotide excision repair; hOGG1, human 8-oxoguanine glycosylase. (Cooke, M., 2008)
In collaboration with Chiung-Wen Hu, and Mu-Rong Chao (Chung Shan Medical University, TW), this NIEHS-funded project aims to develop urinary DNA adductomics to study the exposome and identify cancer risk factors.
Proposed LC-QqQ-MS/MS DNA adductomic approach for the analysis of urinary 2′-dN and nucleobase adducts. (Cooke, M. 2018)
We recently discovered that bacteria can modulate the DNA damage response, and induce oxidative stress in host organisms; this project aims to understand how.
This project aims to investigate the relationship between the adductome and the mutational landscape using emerging techniques in adductomics, nanopore sequencing, and single-molecule duplex sequencing.
Based upon some unpublished novel findings, this project aims to better understand why some tumors develop chemoresistance, and how we can overcome this.
Our lab encourages the development and pursuit of advancement. We are always trying to find new ways to better our scientific approaches and ultimately make strides in our fields of research. Below you'll find some our experimental approaches that have been modified by our past and current lab members that have now been officially adopted by our lab for future members. Feel free to reach out to our lab members for more information on our protocols!
Cells are continually exposed to endogenous and exogenous environmental factors, which can lead to DNA damage. Single-cell gel electrophoresis ( the comet assay) is one of the most common methods used to investigate DNA damage and repair (i.e BER, NER, crosslinks, etc.).
See our recent development of a high-throughput variant of the comet assay:
Ji, Y., Karbaschi, M., Abdulwahed, A., Quinete, N. S., Evans, M. D., Cooke, M. S. 2022. A High-Throughput Comet Assay Approach for Assessing Cellular DNA Damage. e63559