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The Dartmouth
July 10, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Prof. uncovers DNA code secrets

For the past six years, biology professor Albert Erives and a team of student researchers have been cracking a code.

In 2004, Erives in collaboration with genetics professor Michael Levine of the University of California, Berkeley discovered a new layer of regulatory code in DNA that controls the functions of different body cells.

After six years of work, Erives' team discovered how this code works and how it has evolved over time, producing a paper on "Dynamic Evolution of Precise Regulatory Encoding Creates the Clustered Site Signature of Enhancers," which appeared in the Oct. 19 edition of "Nature Communications," a multidisciplinary science journal.

The recent discovery is ground-breaking in the study of genetics and molecular evolution, according to Erives. Understanding regulatory DNA which this research contributes to will be the key to understanding how many genetic diseases and disorders develop, he said.

"[The new research] is significant because we do not know how to predict these regulatory DNAs and genomes," he said. "All of the DNA sequences that make protein add up to about 1 percent of the human genome. Right now, there's a lot of genetic diseases and disorders that are known to occur because of DNA sequence changes in the 99 percent that's not about protein-coding, and we don't know exactly how it works and what to do about it. This sort of helps get a handle on how the regulatory part of the genome works."

Regulatory DNA sequences control the process by which a gene is turned on or off, Erives said. This process is what gives different kinds of cells in the body their characteristics. The team found that there are sequences that appear to be binding sites locations where proteins fit around DNA that do not all have functions. Most sequences, Erives said, have either been replaced or modified over time.

"When these switches evolved over hundreds of millions of years, the end result is that you're left with all these little junk boxes that look like they're part of the [sequence] but they're actually not functional," Erives said.

The discovery of these relic sequences may lead to new revelations in the study of evolution and Earth's history and help researchers more easily locate functional sequences, Erives said. "We may be able to associate specific relic sites with past evolutionary events and maybe even to past episodes of paleo-climate change," Erives said in a College press release. "It is an exciting time to work on evolutionary genomics for the purpose of understanding the history and future of life on Earth." Erives co-wrote the paper with Justin Crocker, who received his doctorate in molecular and cell biology from Dartmouth in June, and Nathan Potter '11, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute-sponsored intern, according to the release.