We are interested in understanding fundamental mechanisms that coordinate and compartmentalize the transcription of genes as a function of their positions in the genome. We have found that the effects of genome position vary across cell types indicating that genome position effects are plastic. To study the mechanisms and consequences of genome plasticity we use the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster where we develop transgenic probes, disease models, chemical assays and bioinformatics tools to study position effects across cells in a multicellular animal.
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A Drosophila resource of transgenic RNAi lines for neurogenetics (with Quan Jian Ni, Lu Ping Liu, Richard Binari, Robert Hardy, Hye Seok Shim, Amanda Cavallaro, Matthew Booker, Barret D. Pfeiffer, Hui Wang, Christians Villalta, Todd R. Laverty, Lizabeth A. Perkins, and Norbert Perrimon), Genetics (2009)
Conditional expression of hairpin constructs in Drosophila is a powerful method to disrupt the activity...
Exploiting position effects and the gypsy retrovirus insulator to engineer precisely expressed transgenes (with Chrysoula Pitsouli, Christians Villalta, Susan E. Celniker, and Norbert Perrimon), Nature Genetics (2008)
A major obstacle to creating precisely expressed transgenes lies in the epigenetic effects of the...
Vector and parameters for targeted transgenic RNA interference in Drosophila melanogaster (with Jian Quan Ni, Richard Binari, Barret Pfeiffer, Lu Ping Liu, Christians Villalta, Matthew Booker, Lizabeth Perkins, and Norbert Perrimon), Nature Methods (2007)
The conditional expression of hairpin constructs in Drosophila melanogaster has emerged in recent years as...
A regulatory code for neurogenic gene expression in the Drosophila embryo (with Robert Zinzen, Peter Markstein, Ka Ping Yee, Albert Erives, Angela Stathopoulos, and Michael Levine), Development (2004)
Bioinformatics methods have identified enhancers that mediate restricted expression in the Drosophila embryo. However, only...
Immunity regulatory DNAs share common organizational features in Drosophila (with Kate Senger, Grant W. Armstrong, William J. Rowell, Jennifer M. Kwan, and Michael Levine), Molecular Cell (2004)
Infection results in the rapid activation of immunity genes in the Drosophila fat body. Two...