About Us - Goals

The essence of the CycliX project is to study three cycles, the circadian cycle, the cell-division cycle, and the nutrient-response cycle, and to elucidate the interface among them. Specifically, we are interested in understanding the changes in genomic states and transcriptional programs that characterize progression through these cycles, with the aim of identifying a core regulatory network that assures proper integration and coordination among the three cycling systems.

Our specific goals are:

• To identify genes whose genomic state and transcription activity vary during at least two of the three cycles, referred to here as "cyclic nodes". Some of the trans-acting factors regulating these cyclic-nodes (cyclic-node regulators, which may often be themselves encoded by cyclic-nodes) are likely to serve as the gears or cog wheels mediating interactions between the cycles.
• To study the interaction networks connecting cyclic nodes by identifying the most important common cis-regulatory modules and the corresponding transcription factors. These analyses will identify cyclic-node regulators, thus enabling the generation of interconnecting core regulatory networks.
• To explore the functional consequences of perturbing cyclic-node regulator function.