This diverse and stimulating environment will allow a creative and talented student to develop key skills in preparation for a successful career in research or industry. In addition to the generic skills training that is provided through the UEA/EI PhD BBSRC NRPDTP programme, the student will be supported by an excellent infrastructure and will work closely with experts in the placental biology and (epi)genomics. The project is a joint Norwich Research Park venture between the groups of Dr David Monk & Professor Andrea Munsterberg at the University of East Anglia and Dr Wilfried Hearty & Dr Iain Macaulay at the Earlham Institute. We are looking for an enthusiastic and ambitious student who is keen to unite both laboratory and computation skills to develop and apply 3C-based protocols to understand how physical chromatin contacts influences gene regulation in the human placenta.
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Specific loci with interesting epigenetic profiles will be subsequently modified using dCas9-fusions to determine the role of individual physical contacts on driving placenta-specific transcription. In this project we will employ chromosome conformation capture techniques in different enriched placenta cell populations to reveal unique enhancer interactions and alternative promoter usage.
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Understanding the spatial organisation of chromatin in a cell is essential to understanding what regulatory regions drive gene expression in this developmentally important tissue.
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The human placenta has a distinct hypomethylated genome compared with somatic tissues, which may ultimately result in a unique genome architecture profile.