Research summary
Decoding gene regulation is one of the greatest challenges facing molecular biology today, and a major hurdle in human genetics. Most of the functional DNA in our cells is regulatory, and more than 2,000 human proteins are involved in sequence recognition.
As Canada Research Chair in Decoding Gene Regulation, Dr. Timothy Hughes is studying how proteins recognize DNA sequences and work together to regulate genes. Hughes and his research team are using a panel of powerful custom assays (lab-based investigational procedures) to measure the DNA sequence preferences of proteins. They are also coming up with computational strategies to characterize regulatory elements, and examining the origins and evolution of both the proteins and the regulatory sequences.