Abstract
The correct activities of gene regulatory elements and their interplay are essential for the correct coordinated transcriptional activities within a cell. Transcription is regulated in part by events at gene promoters and at gene-distal transcriptional enhancers, whose activities are influenced by local chromatin characteristics and favourable chromatin architectures bringing distant enhancers close to their target promoters in three-dimensional space.
In this talk, I will describe our efforts to characterise the inherent transcriptional activities at regulatory elements using Cap Analysis of Gene Expression (CAGE) and how such data can be used as a proxy to infer the regulatory activities of a cell. I will further present our work on modelling regulatory architectures by decomposition of expression data into positionally dependent and independent components. The independent component carries information about promoter-localised and expression-level associated effects. The positional component is highly reflective of chromatin organisation, revealing chromatin compartments, boundaries of transcriptionally active topologically associating domains, and proximity interactions as defined by chromatin conformation capture data. In all, our work demonstrates a close relationship between transcription and higher order regulatory organisations.
Biography
Assistant Professor Robin Andersson received his PhD in Bioinformatics from Uppsala University in 2010 and has since then completed a postdoc with Prof. Albin Sandelin at the Bioinformatics Centre, University of Copenhagen. In 2015 Dr. Andersson started a research group at University of Copenhagen based on an ERC Starting Grant award. His group focuses on genomics and computational/statistical modelling of transcriptional regulation based on large-scale sequencing data.
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Junior talk
Dr. Robin Andersson's lecture will be preceded by a talk by Dr. Aziz Khan, postdoctoral fellow in the Computational Biology & Gene Regulation group at the Centre for Molecular Medicine Norway, University of Oslo, Entitled "Comprehensive analysis, prediction, and annotation of super-enhancers."