UC San Diego

I have been working on two projects through my master thesis. The first project described in Chapter 1 is focusing on studying the regulatory mechanisms of specific methylated DNA motifs using optimized CAPTURE technique. DNA motifs are the sequences that are presumed to have biological functions in gene regulatory, however, the regulatory compositions of most motifs remain unknown. CAPTURE is a perfect tool that we can optimize and apply on our interest methylated DNA motifs.

Epigenetic mechanisms of gene regulation such as DNA methylation and chromatin modification are playing an important role in the development of pathology have been demonstrated, but the epigenetic regulation of gout disease is unclear. The second project in Chapter 2, we modified and applied Atac-seq and RNA-seq to study the difference of open chromatin pattern and gene expression respectively between gout patients and healthy individuals.