Elena M. Pugacheva, Ph.D.

Biography

Elena studies the involvement of two paralogous proteins, CTCF and BORIS/CTCFL in 3D genome organization, transcriptional regulation of gene expression, transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, and epigenetic resetting in normal and cancer cells. Her approach is to study single examples of gene regulation in detail and then extend the analysis on a genome-wide level, incorporating multiple next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques. She recently uncovered the two functionally-different classes of CTCF binding genomic regions (PMID: 26268681) and showed that CTCF mediates chromatin looping via N-terminal domain-dependent cohesin retention (PMID: 31937660).