The chemical biology of the genome and epigenome

Professor Balasubramanian's research exploits chemical approaches to understand the structure, chemistry and function of DNA. His broad goals are to understand the importance of chemical modification of DNA bases, such as 5-methylcytosine and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine, in normal biology and disease states. He will exploit and develop new chemical and analytical approaches for exploring alternative bases in the genome, to include the recent inventions of quantitative sequencing of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine at a single-base resolution and the genome-wide chemical mapping of 5-formylcytosine from his laboratory.