Stavros Lomvardas PhD, Assistant Professor
stavros.lomvardas@ucsf.edu
Administrative Assistant: 415-476-0873

My experiments explore the mechanisms of transcriptional regulation of the IFN beta gene. I am extremely interested in the regulatory principles governing olfactory receptor choice. To understand how olfactory sensory neurons express only one out of 1300 genes I combined my biochemical training with genetic experiments. Initial results provide evidence of a novel mechanism of regulation of gene expression, according to which a single enhancer in the genome is able to interact with promoters of olfactory genes located on different chromosomes. In future experiments I wish to investigate the biochemical mechanisms responsible for the singularity in olfactory receptor expression and to explore molecular strategies that the nervous system utilizes in order to generate diversity among like neurons.