Home

Welcome to the Stone Research Group at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
 

Michael D. Stone, Ph.D. - principal investigator

 

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Center for Molecular Biology of RNA

 

 

Salina Long of the Stone group has created a force-fret combined assay using a magnetic tweezers setup to measure the dynamic interconversion of the G-quadruplex under variable force. The movie below shows the interconversion (in terms of FRET) during a real data trace.

 

 


 

 



The Stone Research Group combines the use of biochemical techniques with newly emerging single-molecule biophysical methods to probe enzyme structure and dynamics of protein-nucleic acid complexes.

 

 

Our current area of focus is the structure and function of the telomerase ribonucleoprotein, an RNA-dependent DNA polymerase that maintains genomic stability by synthesizing repetitive DNA sequences at chromosome termini.  These short DNA repeats form the foundation of specialized chromatin structures, called telomeres, that prevent deleterious chromosome fusion events by differentiating chromosome ends from sites of DNA damage.(more)
 

News:

Dec. 1, 2010. SRG welcomes John Loper the crystallographer to the lab as a Ph.D. student in the PBSE Program.

 

Dec. 1, 2010. SRG welcomes Joseph Parks to the lab as a Ph.D. student in Chemistry and Biochemistry. We congradulate Joe on receiving the three year interdisciplinary Eugene-Cota Robles Fellowship.

 

Sept. 25, 2010. SRG welcomes Emeritus Professor Clive Bagshaw from University of Leicester as a honorary researcher and local microscopy expert.

 

Aug. 18, 2010. Congrats to Martin Hengesbach for being awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the German Research Foundation. 

 

Aug. 1, 2010. Good bye to John Loper our awesome technician...but we will see you soon as John the graduate student! 

 

June. 25, 2010. Good luck to Kevin Najarro who is moving on to the NIH to enter a post-bac program.

 

Jan. 8, 2010. The Stone Research Group welcomes its first postdoctoral scholar, Martin Hengesbach, from Heidelberg, Germany. 

 

Nov. 10, 2009. Kevin Najarro was awarded the UCSC Crown College Undergraduate Research Fellowship!

 

Sept. 1, 2009. John Loper is now the full time SRG lab technician/manager.

 

June 17, 2009. The SRG welcomes Ben Akiyama (MCD Biology Graduate Student) to the lab! We congratulate Ben on being chosen by the Graduate Advising Committee to receive a National Institutes of Health graduate trainee award funded by our MCD Biology NIH training grant.

 

May 15, 2009. The SRG has been awarded a Special Research Grant from the UCSC Committee on Research to support a collaborative project with Bill Scott's group which aims to use single molecule techniques to study hammerhead ribozyme structure and function.

 

Location:

The Stone Research Group is located in the Physical Sciences Building, amidst the beautiful redwood trees on the UC Santa Cruz campus.