Molecular and Cell Biology alum 
Giovanni Bosco Ph.D. ’98, currently Associate Professor of Genetics at Dartmouth, recently received a Pioneer Award from the NIH.
Gio Bosco is a die-hard chromatin regulation guy who became interested in whether long-term changes in DNA structure are involved in long-term behavioral plasticity. Gio did his PhD work in Jim Haber’s lab and provided some of the earliest and strongest evidence for a critical DNA repair mechanism called break-induced replication, which plays an essential role in maintaining the integrity of chromosome ends when the normal end-addition of DNA by telomerase is absent.
In his postdoctoral work, Giovanni turned from using yeast as a model system to Drosophila. In the lab of Terry Orr-Weaver at MIT he focused his attention on the role of DNA replication in regulating gene amplifications and became interested in the importance of post-translational modifications (acetylations and phosphorylations) of the histone proteins that wrap the DNA into chromatin.
Approximately 7 years ago Gio started contemplating the question of how these post-translational histone modifications change during behavior and learning. He returned to his Brandeis roots to develop tools and approaches to address this problem. He received an NIH K18 grant to fund a sabbatical in Leslie Griffith’s lab in 2010. He and his behavior group have remained connected to Brandeis since then through frequent joint group meeting visits.
We’ll be interested to hear more about the role of histone modifications in how learning and memory occurs in the context of social behavior, and in how social behavior can be inherited through multiple generations, as the result of the Bosco lab research funded by this award.
