Bio
Virginia A. Zakian is the Harry C. Wiess Professor in the Life Sciences in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. After PhD research at Yale University, she did post doctoral research first at Princeton University and then the University of Washington, before starting her own lab in the Division of Basic Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She joined the Princeton faculty in 1995. The Zakian Lab, which uses a combination of genetic and biochemical methods, has made critical contributions in two areas of chromosome biology: telomeres and replication fork progression. Her lab used ciliates to isolate the first telomere single-strand DNA binding proteins, the prototype of Pot1, and demonstrated that they protect DNA ends from degradation. Her lab discovered telomeric silencing and cell cycle dependent degradation of C-strand telomeric DNA in budding yeast. They also identified budding and fission yeast proteins required for cell cycle and length-dependent regulation of telomerase. Her work on fork progression began with the discovery that the budding yeast Pif1 DNA helicase inhibits telomerase by using its catalytic activity to eject telomerase from telomeres and double strand breaks. This study led to a focus on Pif1 family of DNA helicases and the discovery that they promote fork progression through all known classes of naturally occurring replication impediments: protein complexes, G-quadruplex structures, r-loops, and converged replication forks.