Jumi Shin

The multidisciplinary Shin lab focuses on exploiting the building blocks that nature uses, including proteins and nucleic acids, toward solving problems in human health and our environment and ecosystem. We design small proteins that bind to specific DNA targets toward regulation of gene expression, particularly those involved in cancer and disease. Protein structure and function is analyzed by various spectrosopic methods including fluorescence (FRET, anisotropy), circular dichroism and x-ray crystallography, as well as biological assays (yeast and bacterial one-hybrid) and testing in cancer cell lines and mouse models.

Nanomaterials are part of our daily lives (in our cell phones, TVs, paints and coatings, and more), so we are trying to understand how nanomaterials can exert pressure on organisms in the environment to evolve. Using a multidisciplinary approach involving quantitative genetics, nano-engineering, and molecular biology, we observed that chronic exposure to nanomaterials can cause organisms to mutate their genomes in order to survive.