It’s been a pleasure to organize the Rules of Protein-DNA Recognition meeting in Cancun. Spectacular talks and an amazing and supportive scientific community!

Finally, we found several CREs that are activated by different signals, such as interferon gamma and dexamethasone, which may contribute to viral reactivation or immune evasion mechanisms.
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We also show how that the genomes of different herpesviruses have very different CRE landscapes, with different proportion of promoter-like, proximal, distal, and CTF-only CREs, different activity levels, and different localization.
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One of these regions (Psi) is present in most adenoviral vectors and contributes to basal transgene expression. We mutated this region, without affecting packaging capacity, which led to reduced basal activity and increased inducibility.
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We also identify many novel CREs in adenoviral genomes, some conserved across strains and isolates and others highly variable.
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By testing multiple isolates and performing saturation mutagenesis experiments, we identify regions in the HPV long control region that are highly variable in activity and the nucleotide changes responsible for such variability.
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Contrary to human CREs, most virus CREs are promoter-like and overlap with coding sequences. These CREs are regulated by TFs such as SP/KLF, ETS factors, CREB, YY1 and others.
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Exited to share our recent work on viral cis-regulatory elements in collaboration with @tewhey.bsky.social!
We identified >2000 CREs across the genomes of 27 human-infecting dsDNA viruses from the Herpesvirus, Adenovirus, Papillomavirus, and Polyomavirus families.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Standing up for science in Boston!

Congratulations Devlin Moyer for a wonderful thesis defense! Can’t wait to see what you’ll do next.