Prabha Dias

Research Interests

As part of the Agard lab working to understand the structure of the centrosome, I am using electron microscopy- based approaches to obtain the structure of the gamma-Tubulin Ring Complex (g-TuRC). I am interested in how the structure of the g-TuRC relates to its function of microtubule nucleation in the centrosome.

Education

I received my PhD from the Scripps Research Institute graduate program in Macromolcular and Cellular Structure and Chemistry for research I did in the laboratory of Ronald A. Milligan, PhD. For my thesis I used cryoelectron microscpy and helical image analysis to investigate how ATPase cycles of the motor proteins myosin-V and Ncd relate to their mechanisms of movement along actin and microtubules, respectively.
I received by B.S. in biology from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California.

Publications

GCP5 and GCP6: Two New Members of the Human gamma -Tubulin Complex, Murphy, S.M, Preble, A.M., Patel, U.K., O'Connell, K.L., Dias, D.P., Moritz, M., Agard, D.A., Stults, J.T., and Stearns, T. Mol. Biol. Cell 2001;12 3340-3352.

Dias, D.P. and Milligan, R.A., "Motor Protein Decoration of Microtubules Grown in High Salt Reveals the Presence of Mixed Lattices," J. Mol. Biol., 1999, 287, 287-292.

Sosa, H., Dias, D.P., Hoenger, A., Whittaker, M., Wilson-Kubalek, E., Sablin, E., Fletterick, R.J., Vale, R.D. and Milligan, R.A. (1997) A Model for the Microtubule-Ncd Motor Protein Complex Obtained by Cryo-Electron Microscopy and Image Analysis.Cell, 1997, 90, 217-224.

Perkins-Balding, D, Dias, D.P., and Glasgow, A.C. (1997) Location, degree, and direction of DNA bending associated with the Hin recombinatorial enhancer sequence and Fis-enhancer complex. Journal of Bacteriology, 1997, 179, 4747-4753.