Anna MalkovaGraduate of the St. Petersburg State University, Russia (1987 MS diploma with honors (equivalent of cum laude) in Genetics and 1993 Ph.D. in Genetics), Dr. Anna Malkova is an Associate Professor of Biology Department at the University of Iowa Collegeof Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Malkova’s research is focused on DNA repair mechanisms. She investigates the repair of double-strand DNA breaks (DSBs), the most lethal type of DNA lesions. Using a dependable and powerful model system in yeast, where a single DSB is initiated by a site-specific HO endonuclease, she successfully demonstrated that imprecise or faulty repair of DSBs leads to structural genomic variations including mutations, copy number variations (CNVs), and chromosomal rearrangements similar to those that cause genetic diseases and cancer in humans. She has a longstanding interest in break-induced replication (BIR), a DSB repair pathway that repairs so-called one-ended DNA breaks, similar to those produced at eroded telomeres and by collapsed replication forks. In her postdoctoral work with Dr. James Haber (Brandeis University), she was among the first who identified this mechanism in eukaryotes. Studies in Malkova’s laboratory provided important insights into the mechanism of BIR, which was found to be fundamentally different from the mechanism of S-phase DNA replication. In particular, it was discovered that BIR is carried out by a migrating bubble rather than by a replication fork, and leads to conservative inheritance of newly synthesized DNA. This unusual molecular mechanism explained bursts of genetic instability that were observed in association with BIR, and that were similar to those associated with cancer and other diseases rooted in genetic instability.

Work in Malkova’s lab is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Anna serves as a member to the Cancer Etiology study section of NIH/NCI. Read More Read Less