The Gersbach lab is home to a variety of projects, the one thing they all have in common is that these projects focus on genetics. My specific project focuses on the genetics behind Prader-Willi syndrome. Patients with this syndrome exhibit a multitude of negative symptoms, but the most known symptom is constant unbearable hunger.
Organisms have a maternal and a paternal copy of every autosomal chromosome, however, these copies are not the same. This means that the maternal copy of the chromosome carries some genetic information that the paternal copy does not. This phenomenon is known as genetic imprinting.
Prader-Willi syndrome is caused by an error in genomic imprinting. In PW syndrome, the patient has a loss of expression in the paternal copy of chromosome 15. However, with epigenetic therapy it may be possible to use CRISPR-Cas 9 to activate the maternal copy of this gene. My mentor is focused on finding the locus in the maternal gene that controls the PWS gene expression.
