Helena Francis
MSci, BA, ATCL
DPhil Student
I am currently a 2nd year DPhil student on the Wellcome Trust Chromosome and Developmental Biology programme. My work in Doug Higgs' lab focuses on the function of enhancer elements in gene regulation, using the mouse α-globin locus as a model.
By pulling apart the sequence of a single enhancer, I aim to hone in on the nuts and bolts of the protein-DNA and protein-protein interactions that regulate expression of the α-globin gene. As such, my project asks how functional readout from RNA data links to molecular annotation of the locus gained from techniques such as ATAC-seq, ChIP-seq and Capture-C.