Benoit Ballester

My research focuses on the analysis of non-coding regions of the human genome using high-throughput sequencing data such as (ChIP-seq, RNA-seq, ChIA-PET, DNase-seq, MNAse-seq). I am interested in understanding how the so called non-coding genome play a central role in gene regulation. This previously "junk-dna" is currently seen as playing a key and extremely complex role in our genome.

How those yet un-annotated regulatory elements can shape the expression and the dynamics of our genomes is the main goal of my work. To address that we first created a catalogue of regulatory elements by integrating hundreds of public TF ChIP-seq experiments as well as Encode data. This allow us to observe a complex landscape of regulatory elements (Enhancers/CRMs) in the human genome.