We’re excited to share that the Diezmann Lab has received a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA/R35) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), supporting our research through 2030.
The award will fund our work, “Single-molecule imaging and mechanisms of crossover regulation on meiotic chromosomes,” as we continue investigating how chromosomes communicate and coordinate the reshaping of genetic information during reproduction.
MIRA awards are designed to give researchers greater stability and flexibility to pursue important questions as their work evolves. For our lab, this means more opportunity to follow unexpected discoveries, develop new approaches, and dig deeper into the fundamental mechanisms that allow cells to carefully break, repair, and reorganize DNA.
We’re working to understand how chromosomes communicate and coordinate the reshaping of genetic information during reproduction.
Our research uses C. elegans and advanced microscopy to watch individual molecules at work inside living cells. By observing how proteins move, interact, and communicate along meiotic chromosomes, we’re working to understand how crossover events are coordinated—and how cells manage the remarkable challenge of generating genetic diversity while maintaining the integrity of the genome.
This support will allow us to continue pushing the boundaries of what we can observe and measure during meiosis, while bringing together ideas from genetics, biophysics, nanoscience, and synthetic biology. Ultimately, we hope these discoveries will reveal fundamental principles of how biological systems organize and communicate—insights that could have implications for reproductive health, DNA repair, cancer biology, and crop breeding.
We’re grateful for the support that will help us keep asking big questions, following unexpected discoveries, and uncovering how life reshapes its genetic code. Thank you to the reviewers who helped make this award possible and to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences for supporting our research and our team. We’re excited for what the next four years of discovery will bring!
About the Diezmann Lab
The Diezmann Lab studies how molecules sense, communicate, and coordinate inside living cells, using single-molecule imaging and quantitative biophysics to uncover the hidden signals that shape reproduction, genetic diversity, and life itself.