Senior Investigator, Lady Davis Institute, Jewish General Hospital
Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology, and of Medicine, McGill University
Chercheur national of the Fonds de recherche Québec - Santé
Chantal Autexier obtained her Ph.D. from the Microbiology and Immunology Department at McGill University in 1991 and pursued postdoctoral training with Carol W. Greider at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York from 1991 to 1996. She is best known for her studies identifying and characterizing essential determinants of telomerase function (Autexier, C. and Lue, N.F. 2006. The structure and function of telomerase reverse transcriptase. Annual Review of Biochemistry, 75, 493-517). Her current research team is actively pursuing the identification and characterization of mechanisms that regulate telomerase and telomere function, and cell survival, with the long term objective to develop anti-cancer therapies that target telomerase or telomeres. She is co-organizer of the Canadian Symposiums on Telomeres and Genome Integrity.
Major Research Activities
The long-term objective of Chantal Autexier’s research is the development of anti-cancer therapies that target telomerase or telomere function.
Her research team’s short-term objectives are to: 1) identify and characterize the mechanisms that regulate telomerase and telomere function; and 2) evaluate the principles of anti-cancer strategies that target telomerase or telomere function.
Recent Publications
MacNeil, D.E., Lambert-Lanteigne, P., Qin, J., McManus, F., Bonneil, E., Thibault, P., and Autexier, C. 2021. SUMOylation- and GAR1-dependent regulation of dyskerin nuclear and subnuclear localization.
Mar 24;41(4):e00464-20. doi: 10.1128/MCB.00464-20. Print 2021 Mar 24.
Shen, M., Young, A. and Autexier, C. 2021. PCNA, a focus on replication stress and the alternative lengthening of telomeres pathway. DNA Repair,2021 Apr;100:103055. doi: 10.1016/j.dnarep.2021.103055. Epub 2021 Feb 3.
MacNeil, D.E., Lambert-Lanteigne, P. and Autexier, C. 2019. N-terminal residues of human dyskerin are required for interactions with telomerase RNA that prevent RNA degradation. Nucl. Acids Res. 2019 Jun 4;47(10):5368-5380.
Chu, T.W., D’Souza, Y. and Autexier, C. 2016. The Insertion in Fingers Domain in human telomerase can mediate enzyme processivity and telomerase recruitment to telomeres in a TPP1-dependent manner. Molecular and Cellular Biology. 1, 210-222.