Dr Ben Carty

Research and Teaching

My research interest lies in understanding how our genetic information, packaged into chromosomes, can be segregated between two daughter cells with high fidelity. Chromosomes of most modern organisms, like humans, have a single point of segregation at a site known as a centromere. During my doctoral training, I worked on understanding how a centromere is organised in chromosomes that are asymmetrically segregated e.g. a stem cell. I determined that centromere proteins are asymmetrically distributed in germline stem cells of the fruit fly, with the chromosomes retained by the stem cell maintaining stronger centromeres (i.e. a higher concentration of centromere proteins). Moreover, this asymmetry is crucial to cell fate decisions.

Now at Oxford, I transitioned to working on the centromere in human cells. My goal - to build these centromeres from scratch on a human chromosome with a high precision. While much is known about the composition of ‘existing’ centromeres, our knowledge of the ‘birth’ of centromeres is rudimentary. Yet, this is critical to understanding centromere position, karyotype evolution, and ultimately to our ability to engineer centromeres for synthetic biology/gene therapy purposes.

My teaching revolves around chromosome organisation and gene expression. I have taught on many practical courses in basic biochemistry as well as supervising Part II biochemistry students for research projects.