Autoimmune disease affects up to 5% of the population and can cause significant morbidity and mortality. Many patients require lifelong therapy to treat their autoimmune disease and these therapies often have significant side-effects. Our labs main focus is to understand the basic mechanisms by which immune tolerance is broken. Specifically, the lab is interested in studying the role of epigenetics in the development of autoimmunity. Epigenetics can broadly be defined as the regulation of gene expression without changing the DNA code. The two best characterized epigenetic marks are DNA methylation and histone methylation with DNA methylation repressing transcription and histone methylation either activating or repressing transcription depending on the specific histone mark. In order to study the role of epigenetics in the development of autoimmunity, the lab utilizes a variety of novel conditional knockout mouse lines to study the effect of deletion of specific epigenetic proteins on immune tolerance.
Are you interested in joining the Waterfield Lab? Postdocs and Rotation Students are welcome to apply. Please send your CV to [email protected]