| Abstract |
Blood stem cells provide the constant supply of new blood cells throughout a person?s lifetime. Their transcriptional regulation, i.e. the fine tuning of which genes should be active at any given time, is critical for their normal function. Moreover, a large number of leukaemias arise, when this fine balance of gene activities is disturbed. However, very little is known about the molecular mechanisms responsible for setting appropriate gene activities although it is clear that they must be controlled by networks of transcription factors. Transcription factors are genes responsible for controlling the activity of other genes. This proposal aims to discover how key regulators of normal blood stem cells are integrated into the wider blood stem cell regulatory networks. This will lay the foundation for future studies aiming to identify how perturbation of specific genes causes leukaemia. |
