Steven Artandi

Biography

Steven Artandi Jerome and Daisy Low Gilbert Professor and Professor of Biochemistry in department Hematology at Stanford University

Research Interest

Telomeres, the nucleotide repeats that cap the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, serve critical roles in promoting cell viability and in maintaining chromosomal stability. In humans, telomeres shorten progressively with cell division and aging because DNA polymerase cannot fully replicate the extreme ends of chromosomes. Critical telomere shortening and loss of the protective telomere capping function in cell culture initiates senescence and crisis responses that profoundly alter chromosome stability, cell cycle progression and survival. Expression of telomerase, the reverse transcriptase that synthesizes telomere repeats, is sufficient to lengthen and stabilize telomeres, thus enabling cells to proliferate in an unlimited fashion. Telomerase is expressed in stem cells and progenitor cells in self-renewing tissues, is downregulated with differentiation and upregulated in the vast majority of human cancers. In the Artandi lab, we are interested in unraveling the molecular and cellular mechanisms according to which telomeres and telomerase modulate stem cell function and carcinogenesis.