Titles
- Associate Member, Translational Research Program, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
- Affiliate Association Professor, Lab Medicine and Pathology
Linked information
- jbielas(at)fredhutch.org
Departments
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Lab Medicine and Pathology
Role of DNA mutation in aging and cancer
Dr. Bielas is an Associate Member in the Translational Research Program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and an Affiliate Associate Professor in the UW Department of Lab Medicine and Pathology. He has a long-standing interest in the relationships between aging, mutagenesis, and cancer. His past work includes discoveries that proliferation or transcription is required for nuclear DNA repair and mutation; he provided the most conclusive evidence for existence of the mutator phenotype in human cancers; he determined that polymerase-induced mitochondrial DNA point mutations do not drive aging; and he revealed that human cancers exhibit decreased mitochondrial DNA mutagenesis relative to normal tissues. For this work he has developed novel technologies, including adapting transgenic technologies to measure DNA adducts and mutation in mice; inventing the Random Mutation Capture (RMC) assay to quantify mutations in any DNA-based organism, including mtDNA point mutations and deletions; and development of a novel qPCR-based DNA damage detection assay [1]. Moreover, his lab recently established an exceptionally sensitive next generation sequencing (NSG)-based mutational assay [2].
1. Bielas JH, Heddle JA (2004) Quiescent murine cells lack global genomic repair but are proficient in transcription-coupled repair DNA repair 3:711-717 doi:10.1016/j.dnarep.2004.02.010
2. Gregory MT et al. (2016) Targeted single molecule mutation detection with massively parallel sequencing Nucleic Acids Res 44:e22 doi:10.1093/nar/gkv915
