Jacqueline M. Dresch
Clark University, USA
Title: Detecting nucleotide interdependency in transcription factor binding sites
Biography
Biography: Jacqueline M. Dresch
Abstract
A long-standing question in modern molecular biology is how an organism’s genome encodes the instructions for every biological process that takes place throughout their lifetime. In eukaryotes, much of the focus of this field has been on understanding gene expression during development and the binding of protein transcription factors (TFs) to DNA cis-regulatory modules (CRMs) to regulate this expression. Our research focuses on the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. We have explored nucleotide dependencies within binding sites for a group of transcription factors known to be critical to Drosophila development. Our results suggest that many of these proteins have varying levels of nucleotide interdependencies within their DNA recognition sequences, and that, in some cases, models that account for these dependencies greatly outperform traditional models used to predict binding sites.
