Brian D. Strahl PhD

Brian D. Strahl a Professor and Vice-chair in the Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His lab has been at the forefront of deciphering how our genetic information or the blue print of life – which exists in the form of DNA – is packaged into cells and how it becomes accessed and read for the process of gene expression. Remarkably, each cell in our body contains ~3.4 billion base pairs, which if stretched out from end to end, would be 6 ft in length. This remarkable packaging is achieved by a class of proteins called histones, which act to open and close the genome (like opening a page in a book) to permit genes within DNA to be accessed and read. Cells are able to make genes accessible through the addition of small chemicals that are placed on the histone proteins (a.k.a. molecular “tags”) which then control the opening and closing of the genome. But how these tags on histones function are not well understood but are responsible for many human diseases, most notably cancer, when their placement goes awry. Thus, the Strahl lab is addressing the mechanisms by which histones become modified by these chemical tags and how they function.