Amber Hohl

Harvard Medical School
Department of Genetics
77 Avenue Louis Pasteur
New Research Building, Rm 264
Boston, MA 02115
fax (617)432-7663

Research Interests

Proper chromosome segregation is crucial in all organisms to ensure the accurate transfer of genetic material from parent to daughter cells and to prevent aneuploidy. When recombination occurs during G2 of the mitotic cell cycle, two main types of segregation events are possible. Recombinant chromatids can segregate to different daughter cells, known as X segregation (G2-X), or recombinant chromatids can segregate to the same daughter cell, known as Z segregation (G2-Z) [2, 5]. During mitosis, the two pairs of sister chromatids for any chromosome are predominantly thought to segregate randomly to daughter cells; however, evidence from Drosphila and mice has suggested these events may be non-random [2, 3, 4]. Early work in Drosophila showed that G2-X segregation was favored over other types of segregation [2, 4]. Recently, G2-X segregation was also found to be the primary form of segregation in mouse ES cells and, furthermore, the segregation pattern in mouse (G2-X or G1/G2-Z) varies depending on cell type [1, 3]. My research focuses on sister chromatid segregation in Drosophila using a newly developed method for mosaic analysis. In particular, I am a) asking whether non-random chromatid segregation is cell type specific and b) establishing an experimental system for identifying the genes that control sister chromatid segregation.

Biographical Information

♦ Third year graduate student in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS) program at Harvard Medical School
♦ National Science Foundation Graduate Student Fellow
♦ Manfred Karnovsky Fellow (Division of Medical Science at Harvard Medical School)
♦ Bachelor of Science in Genetics from Iowa State University (2005)

References