Sreenivasulu Kurukuti, Professor, Department of Animal Sciences, School of Life Science, University of Hyderabad, India

Understanding the physical designing principles of eukaryotic cell nucleus is emerging as a prerequisite in determination of intimate relationship between 3-dimensional nuclear architecture and gene expression. Research from the past decade has shown that non-deterministic chaotic nuclear environment seems to attain deterministic order by thermodynamically favored hierarchical self assembly of co-regulated genes from linked and unlinked genomic loci to cluster along with the DNA binding proteins to form specialized nuclear hotspots, optimized for efficient and coordinated transcription control. These observations challenged the long held dogmas of nuclear processes as a 2-dimensional process and also gave hints of dynamic assembly of genes with preferential physical gene networks in the cell nucleus and might involve physical geometric principles and thermodynamic mechanisms to attain nuclear homeostasis. Our laboratory is interested in epigenetic mechanisms of global interphase chromosomal positioning and its influence on the orchestration of preferential physical gene networks within the cell nucleus and their dynamic changes during course of cellular development, differentiation and disease. We use high-throughput genomic technologies, such as Chromosome Conformation Capture (3C) and related methods, utilizing a wide variety of genetic and cell line model systems in combination with bioinformatics and other computational approaches. We anticipate that system-level understanding of physical and functional organization of chromatin in the cell nucleus and its relation to various nuclear domains and epigenetic features are essential to our understanding of governing principles in orchestration of cell type-specific gene expression program.