Dr. Andrew Paul Hutchins
Department of Biology
Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
Every cell contains all of the DNA to encode the plethora of cell types that make up the cells and tissues of the organism. Yet, the vast majority of this DNA is devoted not to genes, but to transposable elements (TEs) and other repetitive sequences. It is increasingly clear that TEs are involved in a wide range of biological processes, from gene regulation, enhancer formation, splicing and the evolution of novel gene regulation networks. In this presentation Dr. Hutchins will describe their efforts to understand the epigenetic control of TEs. Dr. Hutchins’ group find that TEs harbor complex patterns of both activatory and inhibitory epigenetic marks, and much of the epigenetic regulation system is involved in managing TEs. Additionally, Dr. Hutchins will also describe the contribution of TEs to non-coding RNAs. They find that nearly 80% of coding transcripts have a non-coding variant transcript, and that these non-coding variants are loaded with TEs. They have preliminary data that these non-coding variants are critical regulators of the coding transcripts. These observations have important consequences for understanding genomic regulation and non-coding control.