Mater Researcher Dr Charles Bell’s work to improve the understanding of the factors that control the activity of genes —has received a ~$480,000 funding boost from an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) The DECRA program aims to strengthen national research and innovation capacity.
Dr Bell, who is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher in Mater Research’s Genome Plasticity and Disease Research Group led by Professor Geoff Faulkner has a special interest in transcription factors. The funding, which will run for three years, will enable him to better understand how these key proteins regulate gene activity.
Dr Bell said that the regulation of gene activity is of central importance to biology.
“Gene regulation underpins the differences between each specialised cell type in our bodies and is the main factor that causes differences between whole organisms,” Dr Bell said.
“We know that the genomes of mice and humans are very similar, but because the genes are regulated in different ways, the whole organisms are very different. Understanding how this fundamental process works has been limited by an inability to establish the rules that determine how each gene is regulated.”
“Better understanding of these rules will enable prediction and control of which genes are switched on or off in a biological organism of interest, which will dramatically improve the capacity to engineer their behaviour.”
This ability to better control gene activity will have wide-ranging benefits for gene/cell therapies, synthetic biology and industrial applications, in which control of biological organisms is an important part of the production process.
“I also hope this knowledge will act as a source of inspiration for future scientists.”
