Gene Targeting

Dr Andrew Porter’s main interest is in understanding and exploiting the process of gene targeting, whereby defined changes are made to the genome by homologous recombination between a locus of interest and an engineered DNA contruct. With the potential use of gene targeting for therapeutic gene correction in mind, many experiments are aimed at determining how the molecular events of normal DNA repair pathways relate to, and can be manipulated so as to promote, gene targeting, especially in haematopoietic cells. Gene targeting is also being used to generate conditionally mutated human cell lines for the study of gene function. For example, human cells conditional for the expression of DNA topoisomerase II alpha are being used to investigate the cellular role of this protein, which is the molecular target of many chemotherapeutic drugs (eg mitoxantrone) used to treat acute leukemias and other cancers.