| Research Project | Chromatin Decoding |
| Project Leader | Dr. Fuyuki ISHIKAWA, Professor, Graduate School of Biostudies, Kyoto University |
| Objectives | While the building blocks of an organism is encoded by its genomic DNA, chromatin instructs an organism how to build functional cells from the building block. Chromatin is a complex made up by DNA and associated proteins. To understand how organisms adaptively live, we need to understand how chromatin molecularly operates. Through numerous studies in the past decades, it is now clear that chromatin is regulated at multi-layers, from the atom and molecular levels to the nano-to-micrometer level. In this study, we first will discuss mechanisms how chromatin differentially activates or represses different sets of genes, and stably maintains the complete set of genome DNA. We then will discuss how chromatin control biological functions at a higher level, such as aging, cancer, learning and mind. We finally investigate how we can integrate these-diverse yet exciting behaviors of chromatin into a simple framework to understand living organisms. |