Advances in Immunology and Microbiology Seminar Series: Sascha Duttke
About the event
Featuring research in the areas of:
Epidemiology | Infectious Disease | Disease Ecology | Drug Discovery | Virology |
Global Health | Vector-Borne Disease | Pathology
The Advances in Immunology & Microbiology seminar series is a weekly forum that brings together scientists from diverse fields and disciplines across the College of Veterinary Medicine to discuss research advances in the broad areas of immunology, microbiology, infectious diseases, and global health. Seminars feature student speakers from the Immunology & Infectious Disease (IID) doctoral program, IID-affiliated postdoctoral researchers and faculty, intramural speakers from across the university, and extramural speakers.
PRESENTER: Dr. Sascha Duttke, Assistant Professor, School of Molecular Biosciences, Washington State University
TITLE: Expanding the gene regulatory code: position-dependent transcription factor function reveals a spatial grammar in our genome
ABSTRACT: Patterns of gene activities are encoded in our genome through the DNA sequence composition of regulatory elements such as promoters or enhancers that, paradoxically, often contain highly similar assortments of sequence-specific transcription factor (TF) binding sites. A long-standing puzzle is thus how a limited number of TFs can create the vast complexity of gene activity needed for life, especially when many promoters or enhancers often look very similar.
Shedding some light on this mystery, we recently uncovered a spatial grammar in our DNA. Many TFs, including ostensible activators like NRF1, NFY, or Sp1 can indeed activate or repress transcription depending on their precise position. Hence, it’s not just what TFs binds, but also precisely where. This spatial grammar reveals a new layer of information in our DNA, explaining how a comparatively small set TFs can orchestrate complex genetic programs, with critical implications in health and disease.