Biochemical Journal Young Investigator Award winner

Varodom Charoensawan

Varodom Charoensawan is currently a second year PhD student in Dr Sarah Teichmann's Computational Genomics group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, and a recipient of a Royal Thai Government scholarship. Having obtained his BEng degree in Biochemical Engineering from University College London and an MPhil in Computational Biology from the University of Cambridge, he is now pursuing a long-term interest in utilizing mathematical methods and modelling to analyse biological systems. With the wealth of data accumulating from completely sequenced genomes and other high-throughput experiments, there is plenty of room to systematically integrate different types of data to unveil novel biological insights. Varodom's current project involves surveying the phylogenetic distribution of transcription factors (TFs) from an evolutionary and functional perspective. He has characterized the expansion of DNA-binding domains (DBDs), the essential components of all sequence-specific TFs, in nearly a thousand genomes across the tree of life. The results show the lineage-specific nature of both DBD families and domain combinations in different phylogenetic groups. He is now starting to analyse the combinatorial code of transcription factors in regulating gene expression in S. cerevisiae. This involves characterizing the dynamics of the transcriptional regulatory network of yeast by computational integration of genome-scale data sets.