Christian Speck

Professor Speck’s group aims to discover new mechanisms in the initiation and elongation of DNA replication and to understand the function of replication factors in hetero-chromatin formation. They have reconstituted the loading of the eukaryotic replicative helicase onto DNA, an essential step in DNA replication and use this system to address the mechanism and regulation of two key events: the loading of the eukaryotic DNA helicase onto DNA and the kinase dependent activation of the helicase. More recently, they have started to investigate the role of the helicase loading factors in epigenetic memory, which has important implications for human disease and aging