Email: christine.schmidt@manchester.ac.uk

Research profile and key clinical specialties

My group aims to better understand how cells maintain stable genomes and how genomically instable cancers can be detected and targeted in novel ways. Our two main topics of interest are outlined below.

1. A functioning DNA damage response (DDR) is crucial for maintaining genome stability to prevent cancer. We are studying how ubiquitin-like proteins regulate the DDR, using cell biology, biochemistry, biophysics, bioinformatics and high through-put/high-content imaging/microarray approaches in different cancer contexts (e.g. 1^stpublication below).
2. Ovarian cancer displays rampant genomic instability and has low long-term survival rates, mainly due to a lack of early detection methods. We are establishing cutting-edge nanotechnology, cell biology, molecular biology, biochemistry and advanced microscopy methods to develop innovative biohybrid drug-delivery vehicles to detect and target the disease earlier (e.g. 2^ndpublication below).

 Two key publications

• Cabello-Lobato MJ, Jenner M, Loch CM, Jackson SP, Wu Q, Cliff MJ, Schmidt CK. Microarray screening reveals a non-conventional SUMO-binding mode linked to DNA repair by non-homologous end-joining. bioRxiv (2021). DOI: 10.1101/2021.01.20.427433
•  Xu H, Medina-Sánchez M*, Zhang W, Seaton M, Brison DR, Edmondson RJ, Taylor SS, Nelson L, Zeng K, Bagley S, Ribeiro C, Restrepo LP, Lucena E, Schmidt CK*, Schmidt OG*. Human spermbots for patient-representative 3D ovarian cancer cell treatment. Nanoscale (2020). DOI: 10.1039/D0NR04488A. *Corresponding authors

Possible PhD projects

• Ubiquitin-like proteins in the DNA damage response, genome stability and cancer
• Engineering cellular micromotors to improve ovarian cancer care

More information

My group is committed to training newcomers in experimental science as well as scientific writing, with every PhD contributing to high-quality scientific articles. For more information,  see my profile.

Keywords: Ovarian, cancer, genomes, instable cancers, DDR, nanotechnology, SUMO-binding, Christine, Schmidt, Manchester

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