Dr. Stover’s research team has focused its work on studying one-carbon metabolism, a process essential for replicating the genome and maintaining genome stability. Aberrations in one-carbon metabolism, due to interactions among nutrition and common gene variants, are tightly linked to several common human pathologies. The Stover research group investigates the chemical, biochemical, genetic, and epigenetic mechanisms, and the associated pathways, within the one-carbon metabolic network. These processes underlie the relationships among nutrition, metabolism, and risk for birth defects, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases. The essential vitamins B12, folate, and riboflavin play a central role in one-carbon metabolism; a primary focus of the group’s research has been to understand the regulation of folate cofactor partitioning among the anabolic pathways within the metabolic network and the role of this regulation in disease etiology.
