The Department of Molecular Genetics is administered from the Medical Sciences Building and has nearly 100 faculty members whose labs are located within the Medical Science Building, the Best Institute, the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, the FitzGerald Building, the Hospital for Sick Children, Mount Sinai Hospital, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, and Princess Margaret Hospital.
The Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy programs in Molecular Genetics offer research training in a broad range of genetic systems from bacteria and viruses to humans. Research projects include DNA repair, recombination and segregation, transcription, RNA splicing and catalysis, regulation of gene expression, signal transduction, interactions of host cells with bacteria and viruses, developmental genetics of simple organisms (worms and fruit flies) as well as complex organisms (mice), molecular neurobiology, molecular immunology, cancer biology and virology, structural biology, and human genetics and gene therapy.
MoGen research in the area of Functional Genomics and Proteomics uses technologically advanced methods to comprehensively understand how the information encoded in genes and proteins ultimately functions in an organism. We aim to systematically explore the basic cellular processes underpinning growth and development, and to identify changes that cause disease. Genomics and proteomics are two of the newest biological disciplines, and research in these areas has been driven by the application of technology to biology. Two important technologies driving these disciplines are DNA sequencing and mass spectrometry. New technologies for DNA sequencing were created as part of the global effort to sequence the human genome, completed in 2001. In the years since then, major advances in DNA sequencing now make it possible to obtain the entire DNA sequence of any individual and to determine all of the RNAs present in a cell. Mass spectrometry is a method for determining the quantity and identity of molecules, and can be used to measure molecules ranging from cholesterol and chemotherapy drugs to cellular proteins. Mass spectrometry has been particularly useful in characterizing which proteins are expressed in particular cells, and this information is a powerful complement to quantitative data from DNA and RNA sequencing. The results from these methods and from other large-scale, often robotically assisted, approaches are analyzed using increasingly sophisticated computational methods.
