Dr Romina Petersen

As part of the BLUEPRINT consortium we analyse the epigenome of healthy blood cells, with a special focus on megakaryocytes and erythroblasts. Our aim is to understand which genes and regulatory elements are responsible for creating the highly distinct phenotypes of these closely related cell types as these might also be the elements involved in the predisposition for and development of cardiovascular disease. For this purpose we carry out the bioinformatics analysis of RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, DNase-seq, ATAC-seq and HiC data and integrate them with various other datasets (e.g. GWAS results and whole-genome sequencing data).