Nicholas Proudfoot has been awarded an Investigator Award in the latest Wellcome Trust grant-funding round for a project that hopes to better understand how transcription units are defined across the human genome.
The project titled: ‘Molecular mechanism and regulatory function of protein coding gene transcriptional termination in mammalian genomes’ is aimed at determining which genes terminate transcription by what mechanism and how this impacts on gene expression.
Nick believes the project could also provide crucial insights for cancer research. He said: ‘‘it is now clear that in many cases of cancer, read-through transcripts are elevated, indicating a loss of normal termination. It is critical to understand how this fundamental transcription process is deregulated in cancer.’’
Visit the Proudfoot group pages for more information on the group’s research.