TITLE:

"Mapping Cis-Elements in the Genome: Development of high throughput binding
assays to query nucleic acid/protein interactions"

ABTRACT:

My research utilizes computational and experimental methods to understand
the sequence determinants of gene expression. Mostly we are concerned with
splicing and finding the cis-elements that modulate splice site recognition.
A significant part of the lab takes a computational approach to finding
these signals however we are also interested in developing technologies to
identify these elements biochemically. This talk describes the development
of a high throughput interaction assay to search genomic space for protein
nucleic acid complexes. This work concerns the transcription factor Oct4 and
searching within in vivo binding regions for precise sites of binding. Not
only are these precise sites of Oct4 identified, the method also returns how
Oct4 is binding (monomer or multimer or as a larger complex). We have also
started to apply this method to find the binding sites of U1snRNP, PTB and
ASF in genomic pre-mRNA.