Dr.

Lorraine S. Symington

Columbia University
Area
Biological Sciences
Specialty
Cellular and Developmental Biology
Elected
2018
Symington has made major contributions in defining key steps in the process of repairing broken chromosomes. She focused on three aspects of homologous recombination: mechanisms and regulation of DNA-end processing; mechanisms of break-induced replication; and identification ofnucleases and helicases involved in maturation of recombination intermediates. She solved two longstanding questions: how double-strand breaks are processed to generate recombinogenic single-stranded tails, and how intermediates are resolved to produce crossovers and in doing so discovered and characterized many of the key enzymes that act in these processes. She also defined mutagenic recombination processes that lead to the formation of chromosomal translocations.
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