Graduate Student

Monserrat Sutrias-Grau

Previous degree: Ph.D.from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain
Joined the Arnosti Lab 2000
Advisor: David Arnosti
Contact information:
413 Biochemistry
Email: sutriasg@msu.edu

Research Summary:

My personal research interests are to understand molecular mechanisms involved in the gene regulation at the level of transcription. Specifically, I am studying the role of the corepressor protein CtBP, using the fruit fly as a model system.

CtBP has been involved in transcriptional repression by a specific subset of repressor proteins named short-range repressors, which are able to mediate their activity when bound within 100 bp from enhancers of basal promoters. Little is know about the molecular mechanism of repression by CtBP.

My research is focused in two different aspects. On one hand, I am characterizing the repressor activity of CtBP to see whether it is able to function as a short-range repressor. I am testing the activity of CtBP in different promoter contexts and comparing its activity to the repressor activity of a well-known short-range repressor, Knirps.

On the other hand, I am testing the activity of mutants of CtBP in vivo. CtBP has structural similarity to NAD-dependent hydroxyacid dehadrogenases, and in fact, CtBP contains this enzymatic activity. I am introducing mutations into CtBP to substitute those residues that are essential for dehydrogenase activity in the enzymes, testing them in vivo, and seeing how they affect CtBP repression in the fly. Since the significance of the similarity between CtBP and dehydrogenases is unknown, my experiments will help to establish a correlation between the repressor activity of CtBP and the structural similarity to dehydrogenases, as well as to understand what resides in CtBP are essential for the repression function.