September 21, 2022

Indika Rajapakse in the News

Indika Rajapakse, Ph.D., associate professor of computational medicine and bioinformatics, mathematics, and biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan, and collaborators developed a new mathematical technique to further understand how a cell’s nucleus is organized. These results have been published in Nature Communications

The technique has been tested on several types of cells, and revealed what the researchers termed self-sustaining transcription clusters, a subset of proteins that play a key role in maintaining cell identity.

These scientists hope that this understanding will expose vulnerabilities that can be targeted to reprogram a cell to stop cancer or other diseases.

“More and more cancer biologists think genome organization plays a huge role in understanding uncontrollable cell division and whether we can reprogram a cancer cell. That means we need to understand more detail about what’s happening in the nucleus,” said Rajapakse.

Rajapakse is senior author on the paper. The project was led by a trio of graduate students with an interdisciplinary team of researchers.

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Paper cited: “Deciphering Multi-way Interactions in the Human Genome,” Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32980-z