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Minou Bina
Professor—Biochemistry
Email: bina@purdue.eduPhone: 765-494-5294
Office: BRWN 3131D
For Professor Bina's individual Home Page click here.
The human chromosomes contain nearly 3 billion DNA base pairs. This DNA includes not only the coding regions of genes but also regulatory elements that specify when in development and in which cell type a particular gene is expressed. These elements are dispersed in sequences that are near the transcription start sites as well as in relatively long introns and regions that are far upstream and downstream of genes. We are interested in defining the distribution pattern of transcriptional control elements in human chromosomes and examining how these elements function in the regulation of gene expression. To achieve these goals, we have established several interesting experimental systems and follow theoretical strategies. Our experimental systems include analysis of control regions in human genes involved in regulation of immune response and analysis of gene expression mediated by the long terminal repeats of the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), Figure 1. Our theoretical strategies include development of statistical formalisms and computational methods to identify the regulatory regions in human genomic DNA and to discover previously unknown regulatory protein-binding elements in DNA.
The relative distribution of protein binding and control elements in the HIV-1 long terminal repeats.
Education
B.A., 1970 Temple University; M.A., 1972, Ph.D., 1974 Yale UniversityRecognitions
- Senior Fellow, NIH, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 1977-79
- NIH Fellowship, National Cancer Institute, 1975-77
Selected Publications
- Bina M.;Wyss, P.;Lazarus, S. A.;Shah, S. R.;Ren, W. H.;Szpankowski, W.;Crawford, G. E.;Park, S. P.;Song, X. H. C., Discovering sequences with potential regulatory characteristics . Genomics 2009 , 93 , 314-322.
- Bina M., The genome browser at UCSC for locating genes, and much more! . Molecular Biotechnology 2008 , 38 , 269-275.
- Pares-Matos E. I.;Milligan, J. S.;Bina, M., Exploring transcription factor binding properties of several non-coding DNA sequence elements in the human NF-IL6 gene . Journal of Molecular Biology 2006 , 357 , 732-747.
- Xie J.;Li, K. C.;Bina, M., A Bayesian insertion/deletion algorithm for distant protein motif searching via entropy filtering . J. Am. Stat. Assoc. 2004 , 99 , 409-420.