Announcement - May 15, 2012

Remy Bétous Named 2012 Postdoc of the Year

Remy Bétous, Ph.D., research fellow in the lab of David Cortez, Ph.D., was recently named the Postdoc of the Year. Susan Wente presented the award during last week’s Postdoctoral Research and Shared Resources Symposium.
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Bétous is a French citizen who joined the Cortez Lab as a post-doctoral fellow in 2009. Since then he has been studying the function of the SMARCAL1 enzyme. SMARCAL1 is a DNA repair protein that acts at damaged replication forks. Remy discovered that SMARCAL1 catalyzes fork regression and Holliday junction migration. These enzymatic activities are essential for maintaining genome integrity and the faithful completion of DNA replication. Mutations in SMARCAL1 that inactivate its fork regression activity cause the rare human disease Schimke Immunoosseous Dysplasia. Remy is supported by a DOD post-doctoral fellowship and his research has been published in two papers:

Bétous, R., Mason, A.C., Bansbach, C.E., Eichman, B., Cortez, D. (2012) SMARCAL1 catalyzes fork regression and Holliday junction migration to maintain genome stability during DNA replication. Genes and Development 26:151-62

Bansbach, C.E., Bétous, R., Lovejoy, C.A., Glick, G.G., Cortez, D. (2009) The annealing helicase SMARCAL1 maintains genome integrity at stalled replication forks. Genes and Development, 23:2394-2399