WS photo
Graduate Student
Email: wstine@clemson.edu
Biosketch
Wesley Stine was born in Arizona, and he received bachelor’s degrees in physics and aerospace engineering from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott. He briefly studied engineering at Purdue before switching fields to biophysics, where he worked for a year at Emory as a research associate before entering the doctoral program. During this time he published one paper on the statistics of how bacteria can inherit either healthy or damaged states from their parents while dividing in an antibiotic-infused medium. However, upon joining Laura Finzi and David Dunlap’s lab he switched his concentration to magnetic tweezers, a tool for performing single-molecule biophysics experiments on polymers like DNA. He followed Drs. Finzi and Dunlap to Clemson in 2024, where his activities include writing software for magnetic tweezers and studying the rare but biologically important left-handed form of the DNA helix.
Research Interests
Wesley Stine’s research interests mainly revolve around nucleic acid conformations, and specifically the left-handed DNA helix (known in some contexts as Z-DNA). This is a higher-energy conformation of the DNA molecule which can be produced in vivo by superhelical stress, and Z-forming sequences are widely believed to have important roles in gene regulation, immune signaling, degenerative diseases and cancers. In the Finzi-Dunlap lab, Stine creates and studies Z-DNA in vitro with magnetic tweezers, an instrument that uses tiny magnetic beads attached to DNA tethers to rotate them between the B and Z-forms and observe their mechanical properties, including possible interactions with Z-binding proteins. He is also involved in a study that searches for evidence that the state of Z-forming sequences in vivo is correlated with cell phenotypes, either in cell differentiation among healthy cells, or between healthy and cancerous or otherwise diseased cells.
Publications
Stine, W., Akiyama, T., Weiss, D. et al. Lineage-dependent variations in single-cell antibiotic susceptibility reveal the selective inheritance of phenotypic resistance in bacteria. Nat Commun 16, 4655 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-59807-x