Dr. Sergei Rudnizky is an interdisciplinary scientist interested in the fundamental question of how do organisms tailor the structure of their chromatin to achieve the right amount of expression for a gene, in a specific cell, at a particular time? During his Ph.D., Sergei has discovered the power of interdisciplinary research, bridging between the worlds of reproductive endocrinology and applied physics. He combined traditional biochemical and bona fide single-molecule methodologies to characterize the structure and dynamics of the chromatin of the Luteinizing hormone (LH) genes. Using single-molecule optical tweezers to sense the proteins on a DNA directly, Sergei was able to measure a base-pair-scale diffusion of the LH chromatin and track the binding of the transcription factor to it in real-time. Currently, Sergei is developing novel single-molecule approaches to study the interplay between the transcription machinery and higher-order chromatin structure as a postdoctoral fellow at Prof. Philippa Melamed and Prof. Ariel Kaplan labs in the Technion – Israeli Institute of Technology.
