Dmitry Gordenin

Biography

Dmitry Gordenin, Ph.D., is head of the Mechanism of Genome Dynamics Group and holds a secondary appointment in the NIEHS Biostatistics and Computational Biology Branch. Members of the Mechanisms of Genome Dynamics Group are interested in identifying the mechanisms, genetic defects, and environmental factors that lead to the extreme risks of genome instability. The outcomes of their work encompass areas of DNA replication and various DNA repair pathways. Methodology includes the state of the art yeast experimental models, as well as sequencing and bioinformatics analysis of yeast and human genomes, turning them into reporters of genome instability. Over the past years the group’s scientists have established several important phenomena in the field of mutagenesis, such as mechanisms of instability associated with long inverted repeats, escape of long homonucleotide runs from DNA polymerase proofreading, mutagenesis mediated by environmental inhibition of mismatch repair, new biological roles of DNA polymerase 3'5' exonuclease in mismatch repair and in Okazaki maturation, as well as a general phenomenon of damage-induced localized hypermutation generating mutation clusters in yeast and in human cancers. They also developed new ways to analyze data sets of cancer genome mutations, which led to identification of APOBEC cytidine deaminases as an endogenous mutagen ubiquitous in human cancers.

Research Interest

Molecular mechanisms underlying hypermutation and genome instability Identification of genomic targets sensitized to genotoxic effects of environmental factors