Jacqueline M Dresch, Rowan Zellers, Daniel Bork and Robert A Drewell
Scientific Tracks Abstracts: Biol Syst Open Access
A long-standing question in modern molecular biology is how an organismâ??s genome encodes the instructions for every biological process that takes place throughout their lifetime. In eukaryotes much of the focus of this field has been on understanding gene expression during development and the binding of protein transcription factors (TFs) to DNA cisregulatory modules (CRMs) to regulate this expression. Our research focuses on the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. We have explored nucleotide dependencies within binding sites for a group of transcription factors known to be critical to Drosophila development. Our results suggest that many of these proteins have varying levels of nucleotide interdependencies within their DNA recognition sequences and that in some cases, models that account for these dependencies greatly outperform traditional models used to predict binding sites.
Jacqueline M Dresch completed her PhD in Mathematics and Quantitative Biology in 2012 from Michigan State University and Postdoctoral studies from Harvey Mudd College in 2013. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Clark University. She leads an active interdisciplinary undergraduate research group and has published multiple collaborative papers in reputed journals.
