Deciphering The Non-Coding Human Genome:
Understanding Mechanisms of Gene Regulation
Our genomes are 99.9% identical. The 0.1% variation determines not only the uniqueness of each one of us, but also our predisposition to common diseases such as cancer, heart diseases, diabetes, schizophrenia, Alzheimer etc.
Understanding how genetic variation affects the risk for developing diseases is a major challenge of current human genetic research. Protein-coding sequences constitute only ~1.5% of our genome. It turns that the vast majority of genetic “risk variants” is located in regions of the genome that do not encode for proteins, but rather affect gene regulation. Our lab develops and applies novel bioinformatics methods for understanding different modes of gene regulation and for deciphering links between non-coding genetic variants and disease susceptibility.
