Bennie Lemmens

I am group leader and assistant professor at Karolisnka Institutet and have dedicated my career to understand how cells propagate and maintain genetic information. Aiming to address fundamental questions, I developed original experimental setups in several fields of molecular biology, including meiosis, DNA repair, RNA processing, DNA replication, cell division and cancer research. During my PhD, I used classical genetics and in-depth chromosome morphology assays to reveal how germ cells prevent toxic chromosome fusions at programmed DNA breaks (Lemmens et al., PLOS genetics 2012), I developed ultrasensitive PCR assays and transgenic reporter systems to reveal the existence of a single DNA secondary structure in developing animals and showed how such DNA knots fuel the formation of genomic deletions in developing organs (Lemmens et al., Nature Commun. 2015) and I devised forward genetics screens in living animals to identify fundamental principles of DNA repair pathway choice (Kamp &