Acetylation Dynamics in Eukaryotes:

Relevant Papers:

Downey 2021; Sebaa et al. 2019 Rossl et al. 2019; Bondy-Chorney et al. 2019. Rossl et al. 2016; Downey & Baetz 2015; Downey et al. 2015, Downey et al. 2012

Our research focuses on the intersection of the emerging field of non-histone protein acetylation and the regulation of cellular stress responses (both metabolic and genomic). While acetylation machineries have long been known to regulate eukaryotic stress pathways via the acetylation of histone tails at gene promoters, more recent work has demonstrated that these proteins also impact diverse biological pathways, in all kingdoms of life, through the modulation of non-histone targets.

Our most recent work has employed large-scale quantitative mass-spectrometry to decipher how the “acetylome” is regulated by enzymes previously implicated in various aspects of metabolic control and genome stability. While this work began in yeast, we have more recently extended these methods to human cell lines wherein we have identified conserved protein targets for future study.