Hehuang "David" Xie
Professor of Epigenomics and Computational Biology in the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology at Virginia Tech
His group is particularly interested in strategies to assess epigenetic variation within and between cell populations, and to reveal transcription factors and gene networks controlling epigenetic dynamics during normal development and diseases. The term “epigenetic” mainly refers to histone modifications and DNA methylation, which are alternative ways to control gene expression while maintaining the nucleotide sequence of the genome. In other words, epigenetic changes allow cells with identical genomic content to demonstrate distinct phenotypes.