Year 3
The development of novel experimental and computational approaches has made it possible to identify the spectrum of interacting genomic elements across the entire genome. Hence now it is feasible to assign specific enhancers to distinct promoters and to identify the ensemble of anchors associated with the folding pattern of the genome. During the past three years we have identified the folding patterns of human embryonic stem cells to iPS cells derived from human B cells, differentiated progeny and mechanisms that orchestrate the folding patterns of genomes. Using an ensemble of experimental and computational strategies we demonstrated how regulatory elements in the genome find each other even when separated by large distances. These findings were important since they provide new insights as to how such regulatory elements find each other with great speed, selectivity and specificity to induce lineage specific patterns of gene expression both in embryonic stem cells and differentiated progeny.