An article from the Tuteja Lab, "Combined analysis of dissimilar promoter accessibility and gene expression profiles identifies tissue-specific genes and actively repressed networks", was published in Epigenetics & Chromatin today! Rebekah Starks, PhD student in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, is lead author on the paper. In this article, she demonstrates that while tissue-specific genes have high expression, they only have medium-low promoter accessibility according to Atac-seq. This is different from genes associated with house-keeping functions, which have high expression and high accessibility. She also identified a network of neuronal genes that may be actively repressed in the placenta. Congratulations, all!

Ashish Jain and Geetu Tuteja are co-authors on a study led by Roberts, Ezashi, Schulz, and Schust from the University of Missouri, Columbia: Early onset preeclampsia in a model for human placental trophoblast. In this study, induced pluripotent stem cells were generated from umbilical cords of normal pregnancies and those complicated by early onset preeclampsia. These stem cells were converted into trophoblast in order to study early pregnancy. Ashish Jain carried out bioinformatics analysis of transcriptome data generated in the study, to help identify genes linked to abnormal invasion in early onset preeclampsia. Congratulations to all authors!

Majd Abdulghani, former MS student in the Tuteja lab and recently named Rhodes Scholar, was accepted to the Oncology PhD program at the University of Oxford! She will start in October 2019. Congratulations, again, Majd!

Majd Abdulghani, who received her MSc in Genetics and Genomics in the Tuteja lab, is the first person in Saudi Arabia to be named a Rhodes Scholar! A vision of the Rhodes Trust is to "find and develop exceptional people who will be able to create real change in the world". Congratulations to her on this well deserved honor!

A tool from the Tuteja Lab, TissueEnrich, was published in Bioinformatics today! Ashish Jain, lead author on the paper, developed an online interface and a downloadable R package that calculates tissue-specific gene enrichment, given an input gene set. Congratulations, all!

 Check out our recently published review article on genome-wide identification of enhancer elements in the placenta!

Dr. Geetu Tuteja was awarded an R01 grant from NICHD, NIH! This grant will allow the Tuteja Lab to study transcriptional regulatory networks governing early placental development.

Haninder Kaur was promoted from a Research Assistant II to an Assistant Scientist I! Congratulations, Haninder!

Ashish Jain and Rebekah Starks are presenting posters at the ISMB conference in Chicago:
Ashish - Poster A-106 - 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm, Sunday, July 8
Bekah  - Poster B-730 - 12:40 pm - 2:00 pm, Tuesday, July 10

Majd Abdulghani successfully defended her Master's thesis today! Congratulations Majd!