Final Report Summary - TRANSCRIPTION_REG (A combined experimental and computational approach for quantitative and mechanistic understanding of transcriptional regulation)
The long-term goal of this ERC project was to develop a mechanistic understanding of transcriptional regulation, and arrive at a model for the entire process, from the expression of the transcription factors to their binding to cis-regulatory sequence, through the role of chromatin in this process, and up to the expression patterns that result from these binding events. Notably, we went much beyond identifying and qualitatively describing the components involved, and derived a quantitative understanding of how transcriptional programs are encoded in DNA sequence. We believe that the advances that we made in this problem may have far reaching implications, e.g. for understanding the expression and phenotypic variation that is caused by genetic variation among human individuals, and one of the final works that we devised in this project demonstrated the ability to predict expression level differences among human individuals using only their genotype information.