[9] His lab's work also elucidated how a mutational mechanism (microsatellite repeat slippage) plays a significant evolutionary role in functionally adjusting complex binding site arrangements that recruit poly-glutamine rich factors.
Models of how morphogen gradient responses were encoded had previously been proposed but not tested across a set of unrelated enhancers constructed from a shared regulatory grammar and located throughout a genome.
[1] The pacRNA model ascribes a predetermined combined origin for the universal genetic code (i.e., the codon table), the biogenic amino acids, and their exclusive homochirality in life.
Erives first presented the pacRNA model at NASAs 2012 Astrobiology Science Conference[14] and most recently at the 2013 Iowa City Darwin Day festival,[15] which focused on the origins of life on Earth.
In collaboration with Nori Satoh's lab at the University of Kyoto in Japan, where Erives spent a winter doing research, they also identified the largest collection of notochord specific genes by using genetically altered Ciona over-expressing the Brachyury transcription factor.
[19] The notochord is a defining evolutionary innovation of the chordate body plan and this work was designed to advance understanding of the morphogenetic signals emanating from this important developmental and structural tissue.
In its first three years, CodeGrok developed and used machine learning methods to identify, classify, and clone transcriptional enhancers from the human genome and construct pathway-specific cell-based reporters for drug screening and other applications.
The company took its name from the Robert Heinlein novel Stranger in a Strange Land and its concept of grok, which is to understand something deeply and intuitively, in reference to the goal of "grokking" the regulatory code of the human genome.