Grant: Project Grant

Every cell in your body has a complete human genome. What makes, for example, a brain cell different from a skin cell is which genes are "active", used to make protein, in one cell or the other. Part of what makes cells different from each other is epigenetic modification: chemical modifications of DNA or the proteins that DNA is wrapped around. The first decision cells make in human development is to become part of the embryo or part of the placenta. The embryo and placenta go on to have very different epigenomes: broadly speaking the embryo has an epigenome similar to a normal healthy adult tissue but the placenta has an unusual epigenome, more like a cancer. We are going to use a variety of high-tech techniques to figure out how these different epigenomes form in development. A large fraction of human miscarriages and pregnancy complications are caused by failures of placental development, so it is important to understand how the placenta develops normally. Also, as stated above, most human cancers develop a more placenta-like epigenome, suggesting that the regulation we study in placenta could explain how and why the same phenomenon occurs in cancer and what the functional consequences are.