The National Centre for Biological Sciences is delighted to welcome Dimple Notani who joins the Centre as its newest faculty member. She holds a Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance Intermediate Research Fellowship, and is an expert in the field of functional genomics and epigenetics. For her doctoral studies, Dimple worked at the National Centre for Cell Sciences (NCCS), in Pune on gene expression and chromatin architecture. Her research uncovered the novel role played by SATB1, a global regulator, in association with Wnt/β-catenin signalling in T-cell development. Her post-doctoral work at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) involved the identification of functional variants on the 9p21 gene desert tightly associated with coronary artery diseases. Through several self-developed novel techniques, she discovered disease-causing enhancers in this locus. She further went on to investigate the mechanisms behind the transcriptional regulation of oestrogen target genes by oestrogen receptor-targeted enhancers at the level of chromosomal architecture. Her work has contributed significantly to establishing a new model of enhancer RNA (eRNA) function, and reveals their active role in cis-regulated and ligand-induced gene expression.

Dimple Notani's work at NCBS will focus on creating a predictive strategy to identify functional enhancers, and to uncover the molecular mechanisms responsible for mediating their transcriptional programs.