ERC Starting Grant · 2016
Mapping the retrotransposon-mediated layer of neuronal gene regulation in the human genome
Throughout evolution, the human genome has been attacked by retrotransposons, parasitic DNA elements that spread through our genome by a copy-paste activity. I previously showed that SVA elements, the youngest class of retrotransposons in our genome, harbour a strong gene-regulatory potential which is normally repressed by KRAB zinc finger protein ZNF91 (Jacobs et al., 2014, Nature). However, for reasons unknown, repression of retrotransposons is much less efficient in the human brain, resulting in activation of the enhancer potential of SVA elements spread throughout the human genome. The importance of these SVA insertions for the evolution of human neuronal gene-regulatory networks, and…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.