Our long-term goal is to develop a complete understanding of the spatial and temporal events involved in the regulation of RNA polymerase II transcription and pre-mRNA processing in living cells. By understanding these parameters in the context of the living cell, we will have the basis to identify changes in these events that occur in cells or tissues associated with various disease states. Our short-term goals are to elucidate the dynamics of gene expression in real-time at the single cell level. We have developed a live cell system that allows us to directly visualize an inducible genetic locus and its RNA and protein products in living cells. Using this system we will: determine the order of recruitment of the gene expression machinery to a regulatable genetic locus in living cells, determine the turnover of proteins at the transcription site, examine the dynamics of chromatin remodeling upon transcriptional down-regulation, and determine how transcription and DNA replication are spatially coordinated at a specific DNA locus. We will also determine what regulates the organization of the gene expression machinery during mitosis/G1. Finally, we will characterize a novel protein, Btf, that may be involved in coordinating transcription and pre-mRNA splicing. It is important to understand the functional organization of the nucleus as aberrations in nuclear organization have the potential to result in alterations in gene expression, the end product of which may be one of the many pathologies associated with human disease.
| Arun, Gayatri; Diermeier, Sarah D; Spector, David L (2018) Therapeutic Targeting of Long Non-Coding RNAs in Cancer. Trends Mol Med 24:257-277 |
| Zhang, Bin; Mao, Yuntao S; Diermeier, Sarah D et al. (2017) Identification and Characterization of a Class of MALAT1-like Genomic Loci. Cell Rep 19:1723-1738 |
| Bergmann, Jan H; Li, Jingjing; Eckersley-Maslin, Mélanie A et al. (2015) Regulation of the ESC transcriptome by nuclear long noncoding RNAs. Genome Res 25:1336-46 |
| Zepeda-Mendoza, Cinthya J; Mukhopadhyay, Swagatam; Wong, Emily S et al. (2015) Quantitative analysis of chromatin interaction changes upon a 4.3 Mb deletion at mouse 4E2. BMC Genomics 16:982 |
| Hogan, Megan S; Parfitt, David-Emlyn; Zepeda-Mendoza, Cinthya J et al. (2015) Transient pairing of homologous Oct4 alleles accompanies the onset of embryonic stem cell differentiation. Cell Stem Cell 16:275-88 |
| Bergmann, Jan H; Spector, David L (2014) Long non-coding RNAs: modulators of nuclear structure and function. Curr Opin Cell Biol 26:10-8 |
| Eckersley-Maslin, Mélanie A; Spector, David L (2014) Random monoallelic expression: regulating gene expression one allele at a time. Trends Genet 30:237-44 |
| Eckersley-Maslin, Mélanie A; Thybert, David; Bergmann, Jan H et al. (2014) Random monoallelic gene expression increases upon embryonic stem cell differentiation. Dev Cell 28:351-65 |
| Shi, Junwei; Whyte, Warren A; Zepeda-Mendoza, Cinthya J et al. (2013) Role of SWI/SNF in acute leukemia maintenance and enhancer-mediated Myc regulation. Genes Dev 27:2648-62 |
| Bodnar, Megan S; Spector, David L (2013) Chromatin meets its organizers. Cell 153:1187-9 |
Showing the most recent 10 out of 76 publications
