Welcome to the LeBlanc Physics Lab!

The LeBlanc Physics Lab seeks to uncover how individual proteins interact with their binding partners, how those interactions are modulated by dynamic conformational changes, and how enzymes fail in complex diseases. Our lab uses quantitative fluorescence imaging through confocal microscopy to study these fast biological processes at the single-molecule level.

Our current projects focus on:

• Mechanism of ribosome assembly (RA) and how faulty RA leads to diseases and an increased cancer risk
• Conformational changes in DNA mismatch repair and enzyme MutL mutations, which are linked to colorectal cancers
• Cleavage activity of the non-structural protein NSP-15, which is a SARS-CoV-2 enzyme that processes viral RNA and is thought to help coronaviruses evade the host immune response