Angelika Amon

Angelika Amon B. ( * 1967 in Vienna) is an Austrian biologist who deals with genetics and cell biology.

Life and work

Amon studied at the University of Vienna with a graduate degree in 1989 and his doctorate in 1993 at Kim Nasmyth. As a post - doctoral student, she was at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, before she went in 2000 to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute ( HHMI ) at MIT, where she is a professor since 2007. Since 2011 she has held the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Chair for Cancer Research.

Amon examined the distribution of chromosomes during cell division (meiosis and mitosis) in the body and diseases associated with disorders ( aneuploidy) are related to the normal equal distribution of chromosomes to the daughter cells. They are both a common cause of miscarriage as well as a typical feature of cancer cells. For their studies, the molecular mechanisms involved they used yeast cells and mouse cells (MEF, Mouse Fibroblasts embryotic ). In particular, they found that aneuploidy is often associated with overproduction of endogenous proteins that clump ( by special cell biological activities of failed cells developed in response to the protein overproduction that they aneuploidy stress called reaction) and neurodegenerative phenomena similar to Alzheimer's disease may cause. She studied the detailed mechanism by which the final stages of cell division are regulated, the phosphatase Cdc14 plays a central role, such as Agmon and colleagues found in 1998.

She is married and has two daughters.

Awards (selection)

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