Ms. Arpita Prusty, Ph.D. scholar in the Department of Animal Sciences of School of Life Sciences at University of Hyderabad (UoH) has been selected for award of the prestigious GETin fellowship. This is an Indo-US Genome Engineering/Editing Technology Initiative Student Internship Program supported by DBT. The fellowship will enable Arpita to work for a period of 6 months in the laboratory of Prof. Kees Murre, Distinguished Professor, Molecular Biology Division of the University of California at San Diego, USA.

Arpita joined Prof. Jagan Pongubala’s laboratory in 2016 following completion of M.Phil. from Ravenshaw University. At UCSD, Arpita plans to carryout loss-of-function studies of the cis-regulatory interactions that were captured recently by high-throughput chromatin interactome studies, HiC, using CRISPR/Cas9 technology in vivo. This work is a follow-up of the team recently published article in Nucleic Acids Research in 2017. These studies are anticipated to reveal the functional significance of the cis-regulome, orchestrated by long-range enhancer-promoter interactions and complex combinatorial functions of transcription factors, during cell development and function. These studies may provide the architectural relationship between chromatin organization and cell-type specific pattern of gene expression.