IGSP Faculty

Laura Rusche, PhD

Assistant Professor, Biochemistry

The Rusche lab studies the Sir2 family of deacetylases and their contributions to chromatin structure, transcriptional repression, and genome stability.

Laura Rusche is appointed jointly in the Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy and the Biochemistry Department. She received her PhD in Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology from Johns Hopkins University in 1997. She conducted postdoctoral research with Jasper Rine at the University of California, Berkeley, studying the mechanism of gene silencing in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Dr. Rusche' s training was supported by a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and post-doctoral fellowships from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and the American Cancer Society. She joined the faculty at Duke in 2003.

Dr. Rusche is particularly interested in how transcriptional patterns are established and maintained through the formation of chromatin structures. Her work uses budding yeast as a model organism to investigate mechanisms of chromatin-mediated gene repression and the propagation of specialized chromatin structures along chromosomes.

Research Statement

The Rusche lab studies the Sir2 family of deacetylases and their contributions to chromatin structure, transcriptional repression, and genome stability. Sir2 deacetylases, which are found in all kingdoms of life, have a wide range of biological functions and regulate key transitions in the life-cycles of many organisms. In the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Sir2 is required for assembly of heterochromatin at the telomeres and mating-type loci and for suppressing recombination in the repetitive rDNA array. A closely related deacetylase, Hst1, represses genes required for meiosis and sporulation. We are studying how Sir2 and Hst1 govern the yeast life cycle (mating and sporulation) and how these proteins contribute to the formation of various flavors of repressive chromatin at different locations in the yeast genome.

Recent Publications