Welcome
Welcome to the Coulombe laboratory web page. Our home is the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Our laboratory studies development, differentiation and homeostasis in complex epithelia, from the perspective of a large multigene family that codes for keratin intermediate filament-forming proteins. The skin is our main model tissue because of its accessibility, diversity of epithelia, relevance to disease, and suitability for therapeutic endeavors. In this website you will find information about our research activities as well as the systems and molecules that we study. Thanks for visiting us.
Goals
Our goals are to define and understand keratin intermediate filament function(s) at a molecular level, and decipher the rationale that underlies the differential regulation of keratin genes and proteins as a function of the type and differentiation status, and homeostasis, of epithelial cells. Mutations in keratin and other intermediate filament proteins account for >80 diseases affecting humans.
These mutations often engender cellular and tissue fragility states, reflecting a partial loss in the structural support function of intermediate filaments. In addition, keratin genes are often misregulated in the context of another group of important, multi-factorial diseases. In skin, examples include psoriasis and nonmelanoma skin cancers. Thus, studies of keratin genes and their protein products is relevant to a broad array of diseases for which therapeutic interventions are limited.
