Investigating how dormant senescent cells can drive drug-resistance following chemotherapy

This Investigating how dormant senescent cells can drive drug-resistance following chemotherapy project is offered at University of Dundee.

Most anti-cancer chemotherapeutics work by inducing DNA damage and arresting the cell cycle in either G1 or G2 phase. A frequent outcome of this arrest is that cells exit the cell cycle into a state known as senescence. Remarkably, senescent cells that originated from a G1 or G2 arrested have never previously been compared, even though these states are very different.

One goal of this Investigating how dormant senescent cells can drive drug-resistance following chemotherapy Investigating how dormant senescent cells can drive drug-resistance following chemotherapy project at University of Dundee University of Dundee will be to characterise these different states using mass-spec proteomics and RNA sequencing.

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The second goal of the studentship is to test this hypothesis by

• characterising cell cycle re-entry in senescent cells using a range of fixed and live cell microscopy techniques, before linking any defects to chromosomal instability, tumour evolution and drug resistance.