John R. Edwards, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Internal Medicine
Pharmacogenomics
Computational and Systems Biology Program
Molecular Genetics and Genomics Program
Human and Statistical Genetics Program
314-362-6935
314-362-6985
8220
760E McDonnell Medical Sciences Bldg.
jredwards@wustl.edu
http://epigenomics.wustl.edu/edwardsLab
bioinformatics, cancer, cancer genomics, epigenetics, epigenomics, transcriptional regulation
Understanding epigenomic abnormalities in breast cancer
Research Abstract:
During tumor progression, cancer cells are known to undergo a wide-variety of genetic and epigenetic alterations. In my lab, I am particularly interested in how DNA methylation changes contribute to this process in breast cancer. Both focal hypermethylation (increase in DNA methylation) and genomic hypomethylation (decrease in methylation) are known to be early events, but their cause is unknown. Hypermethylation events tend to occur at the promoters of certain genes and may result in transcriptional repression. On the other hand, hypomethylation tends to occur at interspersed repeats and has been linked to genomic instability and potentially aberrant transcription. My lab focuses on the development of new computational and experimental tools to understand how epigenetic changes arise and their functional role in the cancer genome.
Selected Publications:
Boulard M, Edwards JR, Bestor TH. (2015) FBXL10 protects Polycomb-bound genes from hypermethylation. Nature Genetics, 47:479-485.
Lund K, Cole JJ, VanderKraats ND, McBryan T, Pchelintsev NA, Clark W, Copland M, Edwards JR, Adams PD. (2014) DNMT inhibitors reverse a specific signature of aberrant promoter DNA methylation and associated gene silencing in AML. Genome Biology, 15:406.
Vanderkraats ND, Hiken JF, Decker KF, Edwards JR. (2013) Discovering high-resolution patterns of differential DNA methylation that correlate with gene expression changes. Nucleic Acids Res., 41:6816-27.
Cruickshanks HA, McBryan T, Nelson DM, Vanderkraats ND, Shah PP, van Tuyn J, Singh Rai T, Brock C, Donahue G, Dunican DS, Drotar ME, Meehan RR, Edwards JR, Berger SL, Adams PD. (2013) Senescent cells harbour features of the cancer epigenome. Nature Cell Bio., 15:1495-506.
Edwards JR*, O’Donnell AH*, Rollins R, Peckham H, Lee C, Milekic MH, Chanrion B, Su T, Hibshoosh H, Gringrich JA, Haghighi F, Nutter R, Bestor TH. (2010) Chromatin and sequence features that define the fine and gross structure of genomic methylation patterns. Genome Research, 20:972-980.
Last Updated: 6/30/2015 9:28:47 AM