HAINI CAI

A focus of my lab is to understand how a unique class of regulatory DNA called chromatin boundary elements (CBE) are involved in organizing genes into functional domains. CBEs, also called insulators, are unique in their ability to block transcription signals from regulatory DNA called enhancers to gene promoters. Experimental evidence suggests that CBE located at different locus in the genome can interact with each other and tether chromatin fibers into “loop domains”. Such loop domains can either disrupt or promote interactions between distant enhancer and promoters, causing changes in gene expression. Recent results from my lab further suggest that interactions between CBE are developmentally regulated to allow the formation of tissue- or stage-specific loops to facilitate gene regulation.