Steve Langer

I am currently helping generate recombinant adenovirus vectors for expressing various sarcomeric proteins for use in both skeletal and cardiac muscle. I am interested in vector development including vectors whose expression is tissue-specific restricted and hybrid viral vectors that form epsiomes upon delivery to target cells.  I have also been investigating the potential of the cre-lox site-specific recombinantion system to catalyze novel recombination reactions in both bacteria, viruses and eukaryotic cells. To this end, we have been studying a class of lox site mutations that allows a specific lox site to discriminate between related lox sites and recombine with its congnate target lox site with high fidelity. Our results thus far suggest that this system should allow direct recombination for stepwise construction of ultimately very large DNA plasmids that would otherwise be cubersome to generate using conventional recombinant DNA technology.  In addition, methodologies could be developed for delivery exogenous DNA into cells to generate isogenic cell lines.  As much, this system shows promise for gene therapy applications.