Meet a SLU Researcher: Edwin Antony, Ph.D.
10/12/2021
Edwin Antony, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Antony’s research includes how enzymes function within cells and how they recognize damage to DNA that can cause diseases such as cancer. Antony includes SLU undergraduate students in this vital research
'Best Job'
"A sense of constant discovery is what's exciting," Antony said. "I can go into my lab every morning. These are results that nobody in the world has ever seen before.
"It's like the best job in the world."
Enzyme Work
"I'm a basic enzymologist, so I study how enzymes work," Antony said. "The cell replicates every 40 minutes, four-and-a-half-billion base pairs of DNA that have to be accurately replicated every sort of 40 minutes. Errors occur, damages on the DNA, and these areas often end up in cancers.
"Your cells actually have repair systems that actually find these mistakes. In about, you know, billions of normal base pair of DNA, how does this one enzyme so beautifully recognize this one kink in the DNA?"
"I was completely fascinated by these enzymes," he said.
Working With Students
"One of my primary focuses has been to give undergrad students a proper platform
to do research," Antony said. "They come into the lab and about six weeks in they're
completely hooked onto it, and they're like, 'Oh,
my God, this is super cool.'
"And so in a lot of ways, that has been the most rewarding aspect of what we do is to sort of see these young minds latch onto a world that they did not know anything about.
Working at SLU
"I think it's almost like the perfect time to be at SLU," he said. "The initiatives
they've been doing at SLU have just been amazing. You know, my wife is also a scientist,
a professor at SLU. We would get into the car in the morning, we're talking about
our results. We come over here, we talk about results. On the way back, we are talking
about our results. Our kids have now caught
onto the terminology of what we are talking about and started to make fun of us.
"It's really become such an integral part of who we are, and our lives, that I don't think I'll trade it for anything else in the world."
Meet the Researcher Video Series
This is part of a weekly series of short videos featuring faculty researchers from across the University sharing the important and cutting-edge research taking place at SLU.
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