Dixon Lab

Understanding how our genomes encode the information is an extraordinary challenge for scientists today. At the heart of this is the challenge of understanding how our genomes establish cellular patterns of gene expression. While a variety of cellular processes contribute to gene regulation, recent work has suggested that how our genomes are organized in 3-dimensional space inside of the nucleus plays a critical role for proper gene regulation. Our lab uses both molecular and computational biology approaches to study this problem. We rely on novel tools, such as Hi-C, 3C, and 4C, ChIP-seq, and RNA-seq, to study higher order chromatin structure to better understand how gene expression programs are regulated. A key component of this is trying to understand how human genetic variation may result in differences in gene expression between individuals, and these differences can contribute to human health and disease.