Research

Our work focuses on the impact of our environment in health and disease. From the perspective that health is not merely the absence of a manifested disease, we focus on dissecting how an adverse environment can (gradually or acutely) deregulate homeostasis and predispose individuals to certain types of diseases, including cancer. Our lab's work further extends to quality of life after the disease is cured, e.g. in cancer survivors. In this area, our lab aims to identify long-term effects of therapy and how we can reinvigorate homeostatic mechanisms.

At the molecular level, we study gene expression regulation by the epigenome, by metabolism and by small non-coding RNAs (sncRNAs), including microRNAs (miRNAs) and tRNA-derived fragments (tRFs). Our work focuses on how DNA methylation integrates with additional epigenetic and transcription factors to regulate the expression of both proximal and distal genes and how specific genomic elements, like retrotransposons, can serve as bookmarks on the genome driving long-range genomic interactions. Furthermore, we study how sncRNAs can synergize or antagonize with epigenetic factors in regulating the expression of genes of specific architecture and also contribute in post-transcriptional regulation. Our research would not be complete without metabolic data: metabolism and metabolic needs and fluxes are the at the forefront of molecular physiology and our efforts aim to uncover how the metabolic physiology is integrated with sncRNAs and the epigenome.

We integrate these layers of molecular biology from a systems and network biology standpoint, using a series of computational and bioinformatic tools, statistical algorithms and machine learning (artificial intelligence, AI) on omic biological data.