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Scientist unravels the complexity of folded DNA

A woman stands by a projector showing a Venn diagram.
Associate professor Sheena D'Arcy presents her work on nucleosome assembly at the 12th annual Hansen Life Sciences Retreat.

The Hansen Life Sciences Retreat began as an informal meeting of a dozen faculty and graduate students in USU’s Biochemistry department. Twelve years later, the retreat has grown to a multidepartmental meeting of minds, where new life science research is shared and discussed.

This year’s retreat was kicked-off at USU’s Logan campus with a keynote presentation from Sheena D’Arcy, an associate professor in biochemistry at the University of Texas at Dallas.

D’Arcy studies the way DNA is packaged into cells. No small feat; every human cell has six feet of DNA packaged into a space no wider than a few millionths of a meter. She says this compaction is accomplished by winding DNA around circular proteins called histones into a final product called the nucleosome. When the cell needs to read the DNA to make proteins, a process called transcription, the nucleosome must be unpackaged, but how the cell does this is not fully understood.

“We know the structure of the nucleosome. But sometimes we don't really know how these things affect the structure. And so we're trying to quantify that. But rather than using X-ray crystallography, which is kind of an artificial environment, we are trying to quantify it in solution to make it a little bit more like what's actually happening in the cell,” D'Arcy said.

Using a technique called Hydrogen-Deuterium Exchange Mass Spectrometry the D’Arcy lab is able to observe how nucleosome packaging proteins move and interact at the smallest level currently available. D’Arcy said this work contributes to a body of research that informs multiple areas of medicine.

“In many different types of cancers you basically see a messing up of the transcriptional profile of the cell. So in some of the proteins that are packaged, there are also onco-histones, so mutations in histones that are also particularly associated with cancer. And then also this idea of if we really understand transcriptional profiling, that gives us a toolkit to now be able to change what a cell is. So this sort of regenerative medicine-type idea. So can we take a skin cell and reprogram it to be a different type of cell?" D'Arcy said.

D'Arcy’s work is currently focused on understanding how proteins interact to bring a histone type, called H2A-H2B, into the nucleus, and ultimately understand how its incorporated into the nucleosome.

Max is a neuroscientist and science reporter. His research revolves around an underexplored protein receptor, called GPR171, and its possible use as a pharmacological target for pain. He reports on opioids, outer space and Great Salt Lake. He loves Utah and its many stories.