The Whitehouse lab is broadly interested in understanding how chromatin functions in the regulation of cellular processes such as DNA replication, gene transcription and epigenetics. We focus on understanding basic mechanisms and use a combination of biochemical, molecular biological and genomics approaches. We like to develop new technology and are particularly interested in the development and application of single molecule technologies such as Nanopore sequencing and single molecule indexing strategies.

Background to the lab

We are interested in answering the fundamental question: how are chromatin structures are established and maintained? Chromatin is significantly altered during DNA replication yet how such remodeling is controlled is not well understood. Our published work has shown that chromatin assembly is intrinsically coupled with DNA replication. Our ongoing work utilizing novel single-molecule DNA sequencing approaches is providing novel tools to study DNA replication and chromatin at unprecedented resolution.

Current approaches to map chromatin structure with genomic tools only reveals a fraction of the regulatory information contained within chromatin. We are developing new single molecule indexing tools to map how proteins interact and how chromatin folds in 3D space, we will use these methods to provide a comprehensive understanding of basic DNA dependent processes such as chromatin organization, DNA replication and gene transcription.