On todays episode, I speak to Sudarshan Pinglay, a PhD student from NYU medical center. Sudarshan is involved in the dark matter project- we talk about the dark matter of the genome, where introns, repetitive and regulatory elements reside. Sudarshan works specifically on the HOXA locus. The Hox family of genes pattern the head to tail axis in the developing embryo. In mammals, there are are four separate clusters (HoxA,B,C and D). Both space and time of Hox gene expression is colinear to their sequence in the genome. Loss of this leads to serious defects.  Sudarshan talks about his wet lab and dry lab work, where he has been using the HoxA cluster as a model to understand how the expression of Hox genes is regulated in order to pattern the developing nervous system. He tells us about his work aiming to build the HoxA cluster from the ground up so that he could manipulate the various players that have been implicated in Hox gene regulation and understand the pattern of Hox gene expression and embryonic development. This is the pre print we discussed in todays episode, and more on the dark matter genome project can be found here. Sudarshan can be found on twitter here!