Anat Kreimer
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Genetics
Most genetic variants linked to disease do not fall inside genes. Instead, they sit in non-coding regulatory elements, stretches of DNA that control when and where genes switch on.
- Fields
Genetics
Computer Science
Biology
- Topics
gene regulatory networks
non-coding variants
regulatory elements
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2030
What they work on
- Develop methods that integrate massively parallel reporter assay (MPRA) data, which test thousands of DNA sequences at once, with other genomic assays and deep learning to reconstruct cell-type-specific gene regulatory networks and their condition-specific regulators.
- Build predictive models of how disease-associated non-coding variants affect regulatory activity in relevant cell types, then interrogate the models to find the genomic features driving each cell type's regulatory code.
- Create a user-friendly webserver for building and analyzing gene regulatory networks, mapping genetic variants onto them, and predicting cell-type-specific activity of regulatory sequences and their perturbations.
More about the research
How these variants change gene activity, often only in particular cell types, is still poorly understood. Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are maps of these elements, the genes they control, and the links between them. GRNs offer a way to trace how a variant in a regulatory region could alter cell function and raise disease risk.
Why it matters
Many genetic risk variants for disease lie outside genes, where their effects are hard to interpret. These methods could help researchers generate testable hypotheses about how such variants disrupt gene regulation in the relevant cell types. That could improve understanding of disease causes and support precision medicine. The free webserver would make the tools available to researchers studying many different tissues and disorders.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Beryl Jones
University of Kentucky, KY·Ecology & Evolution
Identify changes in gene regulatory networks (GRNs) linked to evolutionary gains and losses of social behavior across bee species that differ in sociality.
Hyejung Won
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Genetics
Develop single-cell massively parallel reporter assays (scMPRA), which combine DNA barcoding with single-cell RNA sequencing, to measure thousands of Alzheimer's-linked regulatory elements in different brain cell types at once.
Minoli Perera
Northwestern University, IL·Genetics
Identify regulatory variants that affect drug-metabolizing enzymes by analyzing genomic and transcriptomic data from 120 primary hepatocyte cultures, with a focus on African ancestry samples.
The school
Rutgers University-New Brunswick: 57 labs on PI Pages, $837M a year on research, 713 research doctorates a year.
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