Mechanisms of Tumour Genome Evolution

Monday, 18 May 2026, 12pm to 1pm

We are pleased to invite you to attend our next external seminar, with Sarah McClelland, PhD, Professor of Cancer Cell Biology and Genomics, Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London.

Sarah McClelland is Professor of Cancer Cell Biology and Genomics at the Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London and Deputy Centre Lead for Cancer Genomics and Computational Biology. Sarah studied Biochemistry and obtained her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Bristol. Her lab aims to understand the mechanisms that underlie numerical and structural chromosome aberrations in cancer at a molecular level, which also involves understanding how normal cells replicate and segregate their genomes.

Mechanisms of Tumour Genome Evolution
Aneuploidy and DNA copy number variations are defining features of nearly all cancer types. Despite this, very little is known about the mechanisms that cause these aberrations to accumulate, and what their functional significance is to cancer development and therapy resistance.

To tackle these two fundamental challenges, we combine approaches from cell biology and genomics:
- First, we define the mechanisms that cause chromosomal instability and aneuploidy in cancer by characterising the acute genomic alterations that occur as a result of specific chromosomal instability mechanisms after one cell cycle.
- Second, we track the genomic alterations at the single cell level as the cancer cells grow – giving insights into patterns of ongoing genome evolution beyond traditional static sequencing approaches.
- Lastly, we employ a recently developed Cas9¬based experimental tool, that induces chromosomal mis¬segregation during mitosis, to study the impact of specific chromosomal alterations on cellular behaviour.

This seminar will be chaired by Dr Eileen Parkes and Dr Wei-Ting Lu.

Join the seminar: https://teams.microsoft.com/[…]/328951451608188?p=uWObCWbzetrxbH95w4
Meeting ID: 328 951 451 608 188
Passcode: 7re6so2J

Speaker(s): Professor Sarah McClelland (Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London)

Venue: Old Road Campus Research Building - Oncology Education Hub - Oncology Education Hub Old Road Campus Research Building Headington Oxford Oxfordshire OX3 7DQ United Kingdom

Department: Oncology (Department)