Institute for Genomic Medicine

Terry Gaasterland, Ph.D.

Professor of Computational Biology and Genomics
Director, Scripps Genome Center

Website: Gaasterland Lab
Email: tgaasterland@ucsd.edu

Pathways/processes: Control of alternative splicing through tissue-specific RNA binding proteins. 
Impact of alternative splicing on transcription factors and the downstream effect on control of transcription.
Distinction between pathological and biological tissue-specific alternative splicing. Maintenance of cell states through microRNA::mRNA binding patterns. Cis-natural anti-sense control of translation. Transcriptional response to environmental stress conditions.
Teams/collaborations: Kang Zhang, Kun Zhang, Joe Gleeson, Kelly Frazer, Bing Ren
Approaches: High-throughput sequencing, qPCR, Sequence alignment, mapping, peak-calling, Bayesian SNP and indel identification.
Diseases: Glaucoma, Cancer.

Research

The Laboratory of Computational Genomics develops and uses computational methods to analyze genome and transcriptome sequence data and gene expression data to gain biological insights into an organism and make predictions about molecular processes. Under current funding, we are pursuing the assembly and annotation of two model organism genomes:  medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis; and a Tardigrades species, H. dujardinii.  Our approach integrates three data sources: high throughput genome and transcriptome sequencing and high-throughput peptide mass-spectrometry.