Investigating epigenetics mechanisms
I joined the lab of Prof. Peter Sarkies that focuses on epigenetics and evolution.
During this one year, I investigated this protein called MeCP2.
To give some context, DNA methylation adds chemical flags to some bases in the DNA strand. In human cells, methylation turns gene off.
It is known that MeCP2 helps methylation to do its job by binding to methylated DNA strands and recruit "helper" proteins.
Loss of MeCP2 leads to a serious genetic brain disorder known as Rett syndrome,
but scientist still don't understand what MeCP2 does and why not having it leads to such as severe disease.
To study this, we made a simple model in bacteria E. coli. Using this we discvoered that MeCP2 can affect the growth
of E. coli on its own without other "helper" proteins.
We found out this is because MeCP2 directly interferes with the
growth mechanisms of E. coli by incorrectly turning on and off some genes in E. coli.
MSExcel • R (DESeq2, clusterProfiler, AnnotationDbi, seqinr, ggplot2) • Differential Expression Analysis • Gene Ontology Analysis • Statistics
