IIBR Informatics: An integrative study of distal gene regulation

The University Of Central Florida Board Of Trustees, Orlando FL

Investigators

Abstract

Understanding the factors regulating complex gene expression is essential in biological research. The temporal and spatial activities of protein coding genes are controlled by genome sequences which are in general far from their corresponding controlled target genes. The controlling regions interact with their corresponding target genes and significantly strength or repress the activities of these target genes. Despite of decades of endeavor towards studying these distal controlling elements, knowledge of their target genes under specific experimental conditions is still limited. This project thus proposes to create computational methods and tools to fill this gap by identifying distal controlling switches of protein coding genes in the mammalian genomes. The project will involve graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students, disseminate research results through seminars, conferences, papers, tools, websites, etc. The developed methods and tools will be essential for the annotation of mammalian genomes and understanding of human health. Given experimental methods tend to be costly and performance of available computational methods is still suboptimal, this project will develop novel computational methods and tools for the identification of the target genes of distal regulatory regions in mammalian genomes through achieving the following two main research goals: (i) creating computational methods and tools to infer the constraints of interactions between distal regions and their target genes; and (ii) creating computational methods and tools to predict the target genes of distal regulatory regions. The fulfillment of these goals will significantly advance the studies on gene transcriptional regulation and the annotation of mammalian genomes. The project also has educational goals including: (i) mentoring minority high school students; (ii) educating graduates and undergraduates; and (iii) disseminating research discoveries. These educational activities will be well integrated with the proposed research activities. The results from this project can be found at http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~xiaoman/ET This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.