The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has awarded Dr. Francesca Storici, Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences, a new five-year grant entitled “Ribose-seq profile and analysis of ribonucleotides in DNA of oxidatively-stressed and cancer cells”. This $1.4 million project will focus on ribonucleoside monophosphates (rNMPs), the subunits of RNA, that are the most common non-canonical nucleotides found in genomic DNA with several thousands in the yeast genome and more than a million in mouse DNA. These rNMPs distort the DNA double helix, altering DNA function and increasing DNA fragility and instability. There is a pressing need to determine where rNMP sites are in DNA, especially in cells that are under stress and/or with abnormal genome stability, like cancer cells. Storici’s team developed a method to map rNMPs in genomic DNA ‘ribose-seq’ and applied it to the yeast cells. They discovered a widespread, but not random distribution of rNMPs with several hotspots in nuclear and mitochondrial DNA. This new project, together with collaborators Dr. Fred Vannberg from the School of Biological Sciences and Dr. Gianluca Tell from the University of Udine in Italy, will investigate how the profile of rNMP incorporation into genomic DNA changes upon oxidative stress, and whether there is any link with cancer phenotypes.