UGA College of Public Health
Environmental Health Science
Fall Seminar Series

Single-stranded DNA-specific mutation signature for acetaldehyde exposure in yeast and cancers

This week’s speaker: Natalie Saini, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC)

This seminar will take place on Friday, November 11, 2022 at 11:30 a.m. online via Zoom.  Zoom Meeting ID: Please email ehsgrad@uga.edu for Zoom details. Everyone is welcome to attend! For more information, contact Darien Bush.

Dr. Natalie Saini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). Dr. Saini first attended the Institute of Home Economics at Delhi University in New Delhi, India, where she obtained a B.S degree in Microbiology in 2006. From there, Dr. Saini obtained an M.S degree in Microbial Gene Technology from Madurai Kamaraj University in Tamil Nadu, India (2006) and a PhD in Genetics from Georgia Tech (2014).

Dr. Saini’s long-term focus centers around understanding the impact of environmental and endogenous DNA damage on genome integrity. Starting with her post-doctoral position with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Dr. Saini developed a novel pipeline to identify diagnostic signatures associated with DNA damaging agents in yeast. Dr. Saini’s work in this area was used to identify mutation signatures associated with alkylating agents and oxidative damage after demonstrating that the identification of mutation signatures in yeast can be used determine cancers. Now at MUSC, Dr. Saini uses the same methods to identify mutation signatures associated with acetaldehyde. Her lab’s recent findings include identifying acetaldehyde as a single-stranded DNA-specific mutagen and the development a bioinformatics tool to detect trinucleotide-based mutation signatures of acetaldehyde in yeast and cancer.