Genome Dynamics and Recombination

See the publications
Live

The Marseille Cancer Research Center celebrates its 50th anniversary ! -

Llorente team is part of the Genome Integrity department

We study the transactions taking place during DNA homologous recombination and we aim at identifying novel factors influencing this ubiquitous mechanism.

Genomes are dynamics structures that evolve through point mutations but also gross chromosomal rearrangements (GCRs). At the population level, this dynamics participates in the evolution of species, but at the individual level, genome dynamics is responsible for the etiology of genetic diseases including cancer. GCRs include translocations and change in the copy number of large chromosomal segments, whose abundance within populations has been appreciated only recently. GCRs result in part from the recombinational repair of DNA breaks that arise during mitosis and meiosis.

We study the transactions taking place during DNA homologous recombination and we aim at identifying novel factors influencing this ubiquitous mechanism. To this end, we combine molecular genetics and genomics using the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model.

  • More precisely, the first topic of the lab is to understand the regulation of one ended recombination events because they are a mean to generate GCRs.
  • The second topic of the lab is to understand the regulation of meiotic recombination and the DNA transactions taking place during this specialized cell division essential for sexual reproduction.