Bio

Parminder Kaur is a Research Assistant Professor in Department of Physics at North Carolina State University. She received her M.S. in Physics from State University of New York, Albany and further her PhD from Arizona State University, Tempe under the guidance of Dr. Stuart Lindsay in 2012. Her thesis work was majorly focused on studying epigenetics, specifically DNA methylation, at single molecule level. During her PhD, she also worked as an intern in the pharmaceutical company, Bristol Myers Squibb. After completing her graduate studies at ASU, she joined Dr. Hong Wang’s lab as a postdoctoral researcher became a Research Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University in 2016.

Research Description

Her research focuses on studying protein DNA interactions at single molecule level. She has pioneered aspects of Atomic force Microscopy, particularly those related to live and in air imaging, force spectroscopy and recognition imaging. She has also co-developed a new AFM imaging technique, DREEM (Dual Resonance frequency enhanced EFM), which can visualize DNA in protein DNA complexes at high resolution. Her current work focuses on studying the mitochondrial replication machinery involving twinkle helicase, mitochondrial single stranded DNA binding protein and POLG2, understanding the formation and mechanism involving T-loop at the end of telomeres with shelterin proteins and developing the DREEM imaging technique further.

Honors and Awards

• Selected out of 100’s of candidates to present my research in the Annual Physical Sciences Oncology Centre (PSOC) Conference in the Young Investigator meet 2012, Florida.

Selected Publications

Single-molecule DREEM imaging reveals DNA wrapping around human mitochondrial single-stranded DNA binding protein
P. Kaur, M. Longley, H. Pan, H. Wang & W. Copeland
NUCLEIC ACIDS RESEARCH, Volume: 46, Issue: 21, (2018), 11287–11302, doi:10.1093/nar/gky875

Nucleosome-like, single-stranded DNA (ssDNA)-histone octamer complexes and the implication for DNA double strand break repair.
Adkins, Nicholas L., Sarah G. Swygert, Parminder Kaur, Hengyao Niu, Sergei A. Grigoryev, Patrick Sung, Hong Wang, and Craig L. Peterson.
Journal of Biological Chemistry, 292, (2017), doi:10.1074/jbc.M117.776369

Enhanced electrostatic force microscopy reveals higher-order DNA looping mediated by the telomeric protein TRF2.
Kaur, Parminder, Dong Wu, Jiangguo Lin, Preston Countryman, Kira C. Bradford, Dorothy A. Erie, Robert Riehn, Patricia L. Opresko, and Hong Wang.
Scientific reports, 6, (2016), doi:10.1038/srep20513 (2016)

Functional interplay between SA1 and TRF1 in telomeric DNA binding and DNA–DNA pairing.
Lin, Jiangguo, Preston Countryman, Haijiang Chen, Hai Pan, Yanlin Fan, Yunyun Jiang, Parminder Kaur et al.
Nucleic acids research, (2016), doi:10.1093/nar/gkw518