Biology

Dr. Aniruddha Chatterjee
Dept of Pathology, Dunedin School of Medicine, University of Otago, New Zealand

We performed the first genome-wide study to provide single-nucleotide resolution DNA methylation profiles in human neutrophils and showed existence of widespread inter-individual variation in epigenetic marks in normal population. My work has also highlighted the epigenetic landscape of zebrafish brain and liver and opened new avenues for using this model to further understand the biology of DNA methylation. Further, our recent work enabled detection of aberrant driver DNA methylation changes in metastatic melanomas. These findings will be useful to understand the role of driver epigenetic events in cancer metastasis. We are also active and interested in developing novel tools to facilitate epigenomic analysis. For example, we have developed a pipeline (the DMAP package) for robust analysis of DNA methylation patterns in any eukaryotic genome, which is currently the fastest pipeline available for large-scale DNA methylation analysis. Further, we have recently developed scan_tcga suite of tool to analyse methylome and transcriptome data in patient subgroups from cancer genome atlas. In this talk I will present the key findings from some of these works and briefly elaborate on some future directions (single cell methylation analysis and targeted methylation editing).