Group Leader
The Genome Function Laboratory
The Francis Crick Institute, London
Greg Findlay
We hope PETRA’s scalability and flexibility make the method attractive to many labs studying a wide range of genes and cell types, with applications to dissecting the logic of gene regulation, discovering beneficial edits for therapies, and generating data to benchmark and refine AI models.
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Do reach out if interested in establishing PETRA in your system. Thanks for reading, and thanks to our generous funders for all their support. 🙏 @crick.ac.uk @erc.europa.eu
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Join us at the @crick.ac.uk for the 2026 meeting of the UK proteostasis community!
We especially encourage students and postdocs to attend and share their work. All talks (except the keynotes) will be selected from abstracts.
Greg Findlay
Greg Findlay
We define TF motifs that modulate expression and engineer alleles with 2+ motifs via combinatorial PE. Expression effects are largely additive. For example, some alleles with multiple MYBL2 motifs express >10-fold more IL2RA RNA. Conversely, CTCF motifs can effectively silence target genes. 5/9
PETRA affords high scalability and flexibility, as no pre-engineering or elaborate assay optimisation is required. We demonstrate PETRA across four loci in Jurkat cells and two loci in primary T cells, scoring over 14,000 engineered sequences in total.
Highlights of our Results are as follows: 3/9
Scoring of random 6-mer insertions in large libraries is highly reproducible, with dozens of variants having relatively large effects (over 2-fold). Effects of insertions across different genes are largely context dependent, reflecting e.g. transcription factor (TF) binding site creation. 4/9
