Silver: Genome Organization

Our past studies of nuclear organization concerned the spatial and temporal relationships between genes and other nuclear structures and their functional significance. We used a combination of genomic strategies and high resolution imaging to unravel these relationships in, for example, response to signaling pathways.

Recent work from our lab has included a genome-wide study of nuclear organization and involves generating a map of loci associated with the nuclear transport machinery at single gene resolution. In doing so, we made discoveries concerning the relationship between gene activation and repression and associations with for example the nuclear pore. In other studies, we have examined the association of the protein degradation machinery with the genome and found a novel mechanism of feedback control. We have also used novel theoretical approaches to build a model for the organization of the nucleus by merging large data sets generated from the genome-wide organization data.

We expanded our studies into human cells and discovered interactions between the genome and the human nuclear pore complex and how these interactions are impacted by chromatin modifications and drugs.