Pang and his co-author from Stanford University developed a system that identifies silencer regions in a genome-wide fashion. They found that silencers are widely distributed and may function in a tissue-specific fashion. Deletion of silencer regions linked to the drug transporter genes ABCC2 and ABCG2 caused chemo-resistance.
Pang: “Overall, our study demonstrates that tissue-specific silencing is widespread throughout the human genome and probably contributes significantly to the regulation of gene expression and human biology, and important medical phenotypes.”
Read the paper ‘Systematic identification of silencers in human cells’ and the News&Views-article commenting on the paper on the Nature Genetics website.