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 researchers studying Genetic Models of Development and Disease aim to understand how the instructions required to produce a complex multicellular organism are encoded in the genome, interpreted during embryonic development, and how errors in their implementation underlie diverse implementations pathologies, including many types of cancer. How a single cell, the fertilized egg, develops into an individual that may comprise trillions of cells has fascinated observers since its discovery. Over the past 40 years, phenomenal advances with genetic analysis and molecular biology have revealed many of the mechanisms that lay out plans of the developing body, specify the identities of different cell types, and pattern tissues and organs throughout the body. One of the striking lessons to emerge from such studies is that a small number of well-conserved regulatory pathways repeatedly act during development, in different contexts, and in organisms ranging from simple invertebrates to humans, to control decisions about cell fate, tissue growth, pattern formation, and morphogenesis. Consequently, discoveries about the workings of these pathways in simple, highly tractable organisms can readily be applied to investigate the development and genetic disease in more complex ones, including humans.
