Konstantin Krismer (GIFFORD LAB)

An Interpretable Model of Cell Type-specific Chromatin Accessibility

Chromatin structure plays fundamental roles in the regulation of DNA-dependent processes such as transcription, replication, recombination, and DNA damage repair. Despite its importance, the sequence motifs that determine cell type-specific chromatin accessibility are still poorly understood. We aim to identify human-interpretable cell type-specific rules of chromatin accessibility using neural network based classifiers trained on DNase-seq and ATAC-seq data, and present a way to experimentally validate these in silico derived rules.

Joseph Berleant (BATHE LAB)

DNA Sequence Design for Controlled Intermolecular Binding

Synthetic biological and biochemical systems often aim to maximize the modularity of distinct system components. However, many naturally occurring biological systems exhibit promiscuity, in which interactions of varying strengths are seen between system components. These interactions allow non-trivial signal processing and computational power. In this talk, we describe an approach to generating synthetic DNA molecules with designed promiscuous interactions, to allow complex synthetic biochemical computation similar to those observed in nature.