research " ...biophotonics [is becoming] a field that will drive the discovery of new principles of cellular and molecular biology." - 2004, Nature Reviews Molecular and Cellular Biology "You can observe a lot just by watching."-Yogi Berra     Our laboratory is interested in how proteins move throughout the cell's organelles in humans. We have successfully implemented and developed new tools to look at how proteins move within live cells. We are also interested in the discovery of new protein-protein interactions by biochemical methods in vitro, and analysing these interactions in living cells in vivo. We are currently focusing our research on a series of genetically inherited neurodegenerative diseases that all have one basic biochemical defect in common: CAG DNA sequences >36 repeats in the gene's open reading frame that translate to glutamine amino acid stretches in the disease protein. These diseases are collectively referred to as Polyglutamine expansion diseases and include SBMA, DRPLA, HD, SCAs 1,2,3,6,7 and 17.  We are actively involved in trying to determine the normal functions of huntingtin and what the overall biological role of huntingtin is in every living human cell, and how mutant huntingtin exactly leads to Huntington’s disease (HD). What goes Wrong in Patients with HD?     Although the problem seems simple: the presence of polyglutamine tracts beyond 36 repeats , we currently do not really understand why polyglutamine expansion in different genes leads to different diseases, or why only certain brain cells are affected by mutant huntingtin for example, and not all cells. Every cell in the body expresses huntingtin, and huntingtin is a required protein for normal development. We only recently have insights into what the huntingtin protein's normal function is within cells. What we do know now as the result of our work and other labs worldwide, is that many polyglutamine disease proteins shuttle to and from the nucleus normally, but in the disease state can be trapped in cellular compartments, such as the nucleus. We have approached this problem historically by the study of how protein's enter and exit from the nucleus , but are extending these studies to protein movement in the cell in general, and general cell biology.