Aging Brain Seminar with Bing Ren, PhD

Decrypting the Noncoding Genome: Unmasking the role of transcriptional regulation in complex traits and human disease

A large number of sequence variants have been linked to complex traits and disease through genome-wide association studies, but deciphering their biological function is still challenging because most of them reside in noncoding DNA, where functional annotation is still lacking. A growing list of studies has shown that noncoding risk variants may contribute to human disease by perturbing the transcriptional regulatory sequences. However, it is still unclear whether this mechanism generally applies to the tens of thousands of risk variants identified to date. Efforts to address this question have been hampered by an incomplete understanding of the transcriptional regulatory sequences in the genome. Here, I will present our recent progress in the mapping and functional characterization of transcriptional regulatory sequences in the human and mouse genomes. I will discuss the development of highly predictive models for assessing the impact of sequence variants on DNA binding of transcription factors. I will also describe a new resource that allows us to infer the target genes of noncoding risk variants and predict the molecular pathways involved in various diseases and complex traits.

Dr. Ren is Director of the Center for Epigenomics and Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He is also a Member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR). Dr. Ren obtained his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Harvard University in 1998 and joined the faculty at LICR and UCSD in 2001, after completing postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute. Dr. Ren is studying how the non-coding sequences in the human genome direct spatiotemporal patterns of gene expression, how epigenetic mechanisms regulate their output during development, and how changes in these sequences contribute to human diseases. Specifically, he focuses on the identification and characterization of a class of transcriptional control elements known as enhancers. His lab has developed transformative tools for genome-wide analysis of enhancers and elucidated the chromatin features of these regulatory sequences. He is a recipient of the Chen Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in Human Genetic and Genomic Research, and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Host

Li-Huei Tsai

Organizer

Brittany Greenough