By Invitation Only
Date: Thursday, 8 Feb 2018
Time: 3pm
Venue: Level 12 Conference Room, MD6

Presenter: Dr Melissa Fullwood
Title: Towards understanding the interplay between RNA and chromatin interactions in leukemia

Abstract:

Leukemias demonstrate aberrant gene expression, with the generation of abnormal long non-coding and coding RNA. Recent findings suggest an interplay between RNA and chromatin interactions – RNA can regulate chromatin interactions and chromatin interactions regulate the genesis of RNA. Here, we try to get better understanding of chromatin interactions from two aspects: 1) through their association with stretched cis-regulatory elements such as super-enhancers and broad H3K4me3 domains that are important in cell identity maintenance; 2) through predicting chromatin interactions from 1-dimentional epigenetic marks and DNA sequences, respectively, and investigate the epigenetic marks and DNA sequence features that are important for accurate prediction. Stretched regulatory elements showed high association with chromatin interactions and can confer higher cell-type specificities of target genes through chromatin interactions. We examined the problems of current state-of-art computational methods for predicting chromatin interactions and demonstrated that chromatin interactions can be accurately predicted from epigenetic marks as well as from pure DNA sequences. In the future, we hope that this work will be useful in building up a better understanding of the interplay between RNA and chromatin interactions.