Prof. Rani Elkon
Research work
Understanding how genetic variation affects the risk for developing diseases is a major challenge of current human genetic research. Protein-coding sequences constitute only ~1.5% of our genome. It turns that the vast majority of genetic “risk variants” is located in regions of the genome that do not encode for proteins, but rather affect gene regulation. Our lab develops and applies novel bioinformatics methods for understanding different modes of gene regulation and for deciphering links between non-coding genetic variants and disease susceptibility.
Areas of interest & scientific knowledge
Brain Disorders Research
Cellular & Molecular Neuroscience
Neurodevelopment and Neurogenetic Research
Methodology
BioinformaticsSelected Publications
- Shulman ED, Elkon R. Genetic mapping of developmental trajectories for complex traits and diseases. Comput Struct Biotechnol J. 2021 Jun 6;19:3458-3469 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2001037021002440
- Shulman ED, Elkon R. Systematic identification of functional SNPs interrupting 3'UTR polyadenylation signals. PLoS Genet. 2020 Aug 17;16(8):e1008977 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32804959/
- Levi H, Elkon R, Shamir R. DOMINO: a network-based active module identification algorithm with reduced rate of false calls. Mol Syst Biol. 2021 Jan;17(1):e9593. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33471440/
- Hait TA, Amar D, Shamir R, Elkon R. FOCS: a novel method for analyzing enhancer and gene activity patterns infers an extensive enhancer-promoter map. Genome Biol. 2018 May 1;19(1):56. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29716618/
- Elkon R, Agami R. Characterization of noncoding regulatory DNA in the human genome. Nat Biotechnol. 2017 Aug 8 ;35(8):732-746. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28787426/
