| Description |
Regulatory elements of the genome, such as promoters and enhancers, integrate a multitude of signaling and transcriptional inputs in the cell and orchestrate gene expression patterns. But our current understanding of these regulatory elements is fairly rudimentary. Even in some of the best studied systems, e.g., embryonic development in Drosophila, only a fraction of the estimated number of enhancers in are known, and even for them, basic questions such as how they function and evolve remain unanswered. A major thrust of our research program has been the computational, genome-wide
discovery of novel enhancers, using probabilistic methods and cross-species comparison. We have also strived to explain the explanatory and predictive principles underlying regulatory function, the so-called ³regulatory code², and to characterize the evolutionary forces acting on regulatory sequences. This talk will provide a survey of our progress on these three dimensions of enquiry about regulatory sequences discovery, function modeling and evolutionary analysis primarily in the context of the regulatory network responsible for anterior-posterior patterning in the Drosophila embryo.
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