H. Diego Folco

Biography

H. Diego Folco had lived in four countries and worked in seven institutions. He started his scientific career at the National University of Cordoba, Argentina, where he pursued his doctoral degree by studying the role of the H1 histone protein of Neurospora crassa in gene expression and epigenetics under the supervision of Prof. Alberto Rosa. Then he joined the laboratory of Prof. Robin Allshire at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, as a postdoctoral fellow, starting his long-term relationship with the highly tractable fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe in 2004. There, he investigated the epigenetic mechanisms by which heterochromatin established CENP-A histone variant at centromeres, a fundamental process that is required for kinetochore assembly and proper chromosome segregation. In 2009, he continued his training with Prof. Arshad Desai at the University of California, San Diego, where he dissected the contribution of distinct domains of CENP-A to chromosome segregation using genetic and live-cell imaging approaches. Since 2012, he has been a member of Dr. Shiv Grewal’s laboratory at the Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, first as a Research Fellow and currently as a Staff Scientist.

Research Interest

1) Chromosome segregation 2) centromere 3) fission yeast genetics 4) epigenetics 5) heterochromatin 6) kinetochore 7) defects in RNA processing mechanisms lead to uniparental disomy (UPD), 8) Cell Biology, 9) Chromosome Biology, 10) Genetics and Genomics