The machinery of chromatin regulation
Ten years after the human genome was first published, researchers have found new clues into the machinery that influences gene function. The team, led by Bradley Bernstein, an associate professor of pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and senior associate member at the Broad Institute, and Aviv Regev, a core member at the Broad Institute and associate professor at MIT, focused on chromatin, the complex of non-genetic material associated with DNA that drives gene expression, and specific regulators that orchestrate chromatin activity. We know that many different chromatin regulators direct chromatins structure and activity, explains Charles Epstein, Epigenomics Program manager at the Broad Institute. But the specifics of how these regulators operate have been unclear.