[2] Following graduation, she spent a year working as a research technician in Koshland's lab, where she co-authored a study analyzing the structure of a bacterial sensory receptor.
She received her PhD in 1996 working in the laboratory of John Sedat studying several aspects of chromosomes organization and function.
[8] For her postdoctoral research, Dernburg joined the laboratory of Anne Villeneuve at Stanford University, where she transitioned to working on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans.
Dernburg found that in Caenorhabditis elegans, double-strand breaks are required for recombination and for chromosome segregation during meiosis, but not for homologous pairing and synapsis.
Second, pairing centers promote the formation of a synaptonemal complex, in which a protein polymer acts as a scaffold to hold homologous chromosomes together during recombination.
In a related study, her group also uncovered a conserved meiotic checkpoint that acts during meiosis to recognize unpaired/unsynapsed chromosomes.
[14][15] Dernburg's group first uncovered the him-8 gene, which encodes a protein responsible for proper meiotic separation of the worm's X chromosome.
Using live cell imaging they discovered that the synaptonemal complex, the special structure that holds together homologous chromosomes and enables them to undergo meiotic recombination, is a liquid crystal.