Tarun Kapoor PhD

Dr. Kapoor’s laboratory works at the interface of chemistry and biology to investigate the molecular and physical mechanisms that explain how exactly one copy of the genome is delivered to each daughter cell during cell division.
His lab has discovered and synthesized small organic molecules that can enter cells and interfere with cell division processes within minutes or seconds. The effect of these inhibitors can then be reversed to see how the cell recovers. This reversible “shutting off” of a process at a precise time point can be challenging to perform with other approaches. Dr. Kapoor’s lab is currently working to identify chemicals that can interfere with the assembly of microtubule-based structures. For instance, Dr. Kapoor and colleagues identified small molecules known as ciliobrevins. They used these to block the activity of the motor protein cytoplasmic dynein, which is involved in many cellular processes. This discovery allowed them to probe cytoplasmic dynein’s role in ciliary trafficking, mitotic spindle formation and organelle transport. In addition to developing methods for the discovery, chemical synthesis and characterization of bioactive small molecules, Dr. Kapoor is establishing assays to study how the cell assembles the micron-scale structures necessary for cell division. These structures are the product of nanometer-sized proteins decoding micron-sized geometric attributes, such as microtubule length and orientation. In recent work, Dr. Kapoor’s lab has shown how two proteins, PRC1 and kinesin-4, mark the plus ends of microtubules with tags proportional to the length of the microtubules but one thousand times bigger than PRC1 and kinesin-4. These tags may help the cell select and organize microtubules to position the cell division plane and keep chromosomes segregated during the final stages of division.