Buckley, Shannon

The goal of my lab is to utilize genomic and proteomic approaches in hematopoietic stem cells as well as mouse models to study molecular mechanisms regulating cell fate decisions. Our research specially focuses on studying post-transcriptional regulation by ubiquitin E3 ligases in stem cell self-renewal, maintenance, and differentiation. Our work has demonstrated a key role of UBR5 in hematopoietic stem cell development and maintenance Interestingly, over expression of Ubr5 during hematopoietic development leads to bone marrow failure, loss of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells, and anemia by 6 weeks of age in homozygous UBR5 mutant mice suggesting a novel model to study bone marrow failure. We also study the FBOX family of ubiquitin E3 ligases, which contains ~69 E3 ligases. To date only 15 of the 69 FBOX proteins have a known role in normal hematopoiesis. We are currently studying a number of FBOX proteins to understand their role in hematopoietic stem cell maintenance, and differentiation. Our aim is to understand basic mechanisms underlying hematopoietic specification.