Major funding for Dr. Marie Kmita and her Toronto colleagues
The Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM) is proud to announce that Dr. Marie Kmita, Director of the Genetics and Development Research Unit, is participating in an ambitious research project conducted in collaboration with researchers in Toronto. The project has been awarded over $1 million in funding over five years by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Dr. Kmita and her team will receive a portion of this funding to carry out the work conducted at the IRCM.
Understanding the impact of mechanical forces on gene activity
As part of the Force Dependent Chromatin Conformation and Transcription project, the teams of Drs. Hopyan (Principal Applicant, Sickkids, Toronto), Kmita (IRCM) and Sun (University of Toronto) receive $1,021,276 over five years. The aim of this project is to study the importance of mechanical forces exerted on cells in changes to the three-dimensional organization of chromatin - the form in which DNA is found in the cell nucleus - and the control of gene activity.
This innovative research could identify a new, as yet little-explored mode of controlling gene activity, with a wide range of applications. Indeed, many physiological and pathological states - such as embryonic and postnatal development, inflammation, aging or cancer - lead to changes in mechanical environments. A better understanding of how these mechanical forces modify the 3D organization of chromatin could pave the way for new approaches to correcting gene activity in various pathological contexts.
About Dr. Kmita
Winner of several awards, including the Prix Marcel-Piché 2021 for her outstanding contribution to the advancement of science, Marie Kmita and her collaborators are committed to understanding the mechanisms that control the expression of Hox genes, and their implications in embryonic development and the morphological evolution of vertebrates.
More broadly, the Genetics and Development research unit she heads is concerned with the genetic control of vertebrate embryonic development. Marie Kmita's research focuses in particular on the Hox gene family, whose abnormal functioning has been associated with numerous human genetic diseases.
