Brendan Wang will present his MSE talk “ Computational Modeling of Local Insulation of Chromatin in Drosophila ” on Monday, April 21, 2025 at 1:00 pm in Carl Icahn 101. The members of his committee are as follows: Yuri Pritykin(Adviser) and Mona Singh (reader) All ae welcome to attend. Please see abstract below. In Drosophila melanogaster, chromatin is partitioned into self-interacting regions called topologically-associated domains (TADs). At TAD boundaries, architectural proteins called insulators can provide insulation or the ability to prevent interactions between gene regulatory elements between neighboring domains. While existing methods have analyzed the sequence patterns underlying TAD boundaries, they have not thoroughly characterized how such patterns contribute to the insulatory function of TADs. Characterizing how the binding of insulators to DNA influences insulation in a genome-wide manner is crucial to deciphering the cis-regulatory rules cells use to regulate gene expression through chromatin organization. To this end, we propose Domino, a sequence-based deep learning method that predicts local insulation. Our results demonstrate that Domino can uncover the sequence patterns underlying local insulation in Drosophila and accurately predict in-silico the effects of experimental perturbations.