UW Genome Sciences

Research:
We are interested in the molecular mechanisms that insure human genome stability, and how these modulate cancer or other acquired disease risk, and the response to therapies such as anti-cancer chemo- and radiation therapies. We also develop and use genome engineering tools and approaches to understand, treat or prevent disease, and to determine the functional phenotype of human genetic variants.

Specific disease interests include the RECQ helicase and Fanconi anemia deficiency syndromes and associated cancers. Our more engineering-oriented work is focused on human gene therapy ‘safe harbor’ sites, preclinical models of human brain cancers such as glioblastoma and the use of gene drive technology to counter malaria.
More information on these research areas can be found on our lab website - follow the link from this page or search monnatlab.org

Selected Publications:
Knijnenburg, T, Wang, L, Chambwe, N …Monnat, R.J., Jr., Xiao, Y. and Wang, C. on behalf of TCGA DNA Damage Repair Analysis Working Group (2018) Landscape of DNA damage repair deficiency across The Cancer Genome Atlas. Cell Reports 23: 239-254. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2018.03.076.

Pellenz S, Phelps MP, Tang W, Hovde BT, Sinit R, Fu W, Li H, Chen E, and Monnat RJ Jr. (2019) New human chromosomal safe harbor sites for genome engineering with CRISPER/Cas9, TAL effector and homing endonucleases.  Human Gene Therapy 30:814-828. doi: 10.1089/hum.2018.16doi: 10.1089/hum.2018.169.

Horowitz L. F., Rodriguez A.D., Dereli-Korkut Z., Lin R., Castro K., Mikheev A., Monnat R.J. Jr., Folch A. and Rostomily R.C. (2020) Multiplexed drug testing of tumor slices using a microfluidic platform NPJ Precision Oncology 19;4:12. PMC7237421. doi: 10.1038/s41698-020-0117-y.

Hasle N, Cooke A, Srivatsan S, Huang H, Stephany JJ, Krieger Z, Jackson D, Tang Weilliang, Pendyala S, Monnat RJ Jr., Trapnell C, Hatch EM, and Fowler DM (2020). High-throughput microscope-based sorting to dissect cellular heterogeneity. Molecular Systems Biology 16(6):e9442. PMC7273721 DOI: 10.15252/msb.20209442.

Carbone M, Arron ST, Beutler B, Bononi A, Cavenee W, Cleaver JE, Croce CM, D'Andrea A, Foulkes WD, Gaudino G, Groden JL, Henske EP, Hickson ID, Hwang PM, Kolodner RD, Mak TW, Malkin D, Monnat RJ Jr, Novelli F, Pass HI, Petrini JH, Schmidt LS, Yang H. (2020) Tumour predisposition and cancer syndromes as models to study gene-environment interactions. Nature Reviews Cancer PMID: 32472073 DOI: 10.1038/s41568-020-0265-y.