The other aim of the lab is to unravel the causes and consequences of chromosome segregation errors, a trait that is very common to cancer cells. One of our main interests is to reveal the liabilities of chromosomally unstable cells. To this end, we try to understand the transcriptional responses to de novo aneuploidies caused by chromosome segregation errors. We approach this on a single cell level by methods involving live cell imaging and single cell sequencing. Moreover, we try to understand the long-term consequences of imbalanced genomes. For this we generated many aneuploid cell clones and we study their transcriptomes, proteomes and cellular behavior such as growth speed and chromosome instability phenotypes (Soto et al. Trends Genet. 2019).
A relative new focus of the lab is to study a different type of karyotype abnormality referred to as double minutes or cancer associated extracellular DNA. We would like to understand how are they are formed, maintained and if cells harboring double minutes have specific liabilities. Finally, as an unbiased way to reveal liabilities of cells harboring abnormal karyotypes, we perform genome-wide screens where we induce genome instabilities in different ways.