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Current position: Graduate Student, Computational Biology Program, Albert Einstein College of Medicine 2018-2019

Systems biologist Joao Xavier combines experimental and computational approaches to study diverse problems relevant to cancer: how the microbiome influences cancer and cancer treatment, how cancer cells metastasize, and how metabolic fluxes command the behavior of living cells.

Compromised DNA repair is a common feature of cancers and contributes to loss of genome integrity and tumorigenesis. A critical mechanism to faithfully repair DNA lesions, especially double-strand breaks, is homologous recombination. While many homologous recombination pathway components have been identified, their in vivo roles, especially within mammalian genomic contexts are poorly understood. Research in my laboratory uses genetic and molecular techniques to determine how homologous recombination pathways collaborate, compete, and compensate for one another. In particular, we use newly developed assay systems that take advantage of meiotic recombination in mouse spermatocytes to comprehensively dissect at high-resolution recombination outcomes. We plan to leverage this approach to (1) define the in vivo molecular characteristics of independent DNA repair pathways (2) discover new components of these pathways (3) provide a means of testing chemotherapeutic agents to specifically perturb individual pathways with a hope to improve cancer therapies.

Physician-scientist David Solit studies human oncology and pathogenesis, genomics, oncogenes and tumor suppressors, cancer therapeutics, and clinical trials.