Abstract
Our lab is focused on understanding genome-wide transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms in normal cells and in disease, as well as the role of epigenetics and chromatin structure in gene regulation. This talk will focus on our recent work using histone mark profiling to identify active regulatory elements such as enhancers and bivalently marked chromatin elements in primary glioblastoma tumors, which reveal how these elements regulate tumor sub-type specific expression patterns. We have also recently uncovered a novel mode of function of the histone methyltransferase EZH2, a component of polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2). EZH2 activates genes by binding to RNAs and promoting splicing efficiency. This novel activation function of this epigenetic factor can have implications for therapeutic treatment of cancers in which EZH2 is dysregulated.