Biology

Sridhar Hannenhalli
University of Maryland

I will start with briefly discussing our evolving understanding of transcriptional regulation, starting with proximal promoters to distal enhancers aided by chromatin structure.  Along these lines, I will first summarize our work that exploits the current understanding of distal enhancers to better infer regulatory polymorphisms and how that can aid in a mechanism-based model for GWAS. Second, I will discuss our very recent work showing a substantial usage of distal CpG islands as an alternative promoter by genes whose proximal promoter is silenced via methylation. Lastly, time permitting, I will discuss our unpublished work on identifying gene interactions in cancer, going well beyond the most studied types of interactions, namely, synthetic lethality and synthetic rescue.