The ambitious goal of the Duke Center for Combinatorial Gene Regulation, a Center of Excellence in Genomic Science, is to make combinatorial studies of the function of regulatory elements and noncoding variants routine.

The culmination of this project will be the first systematic and comprehensive framework for determining the effects of combinations of regulatory elements on gene expression and downstream phenotypes. That outcome will transform human disease studies by newly prioritizing thousands of genes for targeted study and drug design. This project will also be a major step towards predicting the pathogenicity of noncoding variants that have not been observed, which is key for whole genome sequencing studies of both rate and common disease.

To learn how we plan to achieve this, visit our Research page.