‘Data minig of virus-host systems to understand regulatory interactions’

Domènec Farré Marimon, Mª del Mar Albà Soler, Paul Kellam.

This project will make extensive use of transcription factor binding site prediction programs, data mining methods and databases to study the relationship between different knowledge domains – gene expression kinetics, putative gene expression signals, function, phylogenetic conservation with the aim of correlating cis-regulatory signals with observed expression profiles, predicting function and studying the evolution of the regulatory network. The impact of this work will be double: on virology research, and on the development of methods to extract information on cis-regulatory elements in gene upstream sequences, in particular the identification of functional combinations of sites or regulatory signatures. Computational predictions of regulatory protein-DNA interactions on herpesvirus genomes will be experimentally validated using chIP-chip technology.