Probing the dynamics of eukaryotic replication

Understanding eukaryotic replication is important, because during our lifetimes we copy approximately a lightyear’s worth of DNA, and how the different components of the molecular machinery (the replisome) work together to achieve this successfully is an area of highly active research.  In our lab, we take on the exciting challenge of understanding the dynamics of DNA replication of this process by studying the activity of eukaryotic replisome at the single-molecule level on both bare DNA and chromatin.

In this PhD project, you will learn a diverse set of techniques (synthesizing DNA constructs, purifying proteins, state-of-the-art single-molecule microscopy and measurements, in-depth quantitative analysis) and work together with others in an interdisciplinary team comprised of biologists, (bio)physicists, biochemists, and data scientists.  You will be taught how to perform high-quality experiments and then you will be invited to develop new ones of your own, making use of your training and insights! This research, carried out together with collaborators at the University of Oxford, the Francis Crick Institute, the Hubrecht Institute, and elsewhere, should lead to new discoveries and insights that inform our quantitative understanding of DNA replication and advance this exciting field while contributing to the next generation of in vitro single-molecule methods.