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From the structural and dynamical chromosomal context to the functional organisation of genomes

Objective

With the advances of molecular biology technologies, DNA sequences, gene expression profiles and protein interaction data are gathered at the genome scale. The genomic era presents us with the opportunity to apprehend the collective properties of the molecular component of life at the systems level. To achieve this goal, new concepts and computational methods that allow the integration of the diverse source of biological knowledge in a common framework are required. The structure and dynamics of chromatin i n the cells must guarantee coordinated access of transcriptional regulators to promoters for efficient gene expression. It certainly constitutes an important element of genome regulation. Thus, there exists a great interest in analysing the interplay between the different aspects of biological complexity from the point of view of its physical scaffold.

Previous work have shown that gene position and orientation in prokaryotic genomes display an unexpected scale-invariant distribution that can be portrayed as an operon like structure at all scales from the gene length to the chromosome size. This organisation was interpreted as a possible signature of the coupling between transcription and the structure and dynamics of the nucleoid. Here, we propose to analys e the correlations between DNA structural properties, genome organisation, gene expression profiles and the physical or functional links between proteins in order to propose an original approach to the dynamics of genome regulation.

By using powerful techniques from signal processing (wavelet transform) and statistics (circular statistics), we will be able to determine accurately the characteristic scales pertinent to the description of genome regulation and to perform correlation studies of specific space-scale patterns present in different data types. We aim to construct a model of genome regulatory mechanisms using the concept of scale invariance.

Call for proposal

FP6-2002-MOBILITY-11
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Coordinator

ECOLE NORMALE SUPRIEURE DE LYON
EU contribution
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Address
46 allee d'Italie
LYON
France

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Total cost
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