Rachana Tomar Research Assistant Professor

Dr. Rachana has obtained her doctoral degree in Protein biophysics from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. She joined Prof. Mike Stone's lab in the chemistry department as a postdoc in Oct 2018 and currently she is working as a Research Assistant Professor in Stone Lab. She seeks to understand the chemistry and biological consequences of chemical agents that damage DNA. Utilizing NMR spectroscopy-based approach, she investigates structural changes in the DNA induced by environmental or endogenously produced chemical agents. Further, through biochemical and X-ray crystallography methods, she examines complexes between damaged DNA and proteins that are involved in damage specific DNA repair and DNA synthesis processes. In ACS-TOXI division-in postdoc symposium, she will talk about how secondary DNA damage products such as urea lesions are processed by translesion DNA synthesis (TLS) polymerase, human polymerase eta to give rise to error-free and error-prone replication.