A strategy to investigate cell type-specific effects of non-coding regulatory elements to be applied in neurodegeneration research

I here propose a strategy to investigate cell type-specific effects of non-coding regulatory elements, which have been shown to play a fundamental role during the molecular pathophysiology of complex neurodegenerative diseases such as glaucoma in the eye or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's in the brain. By leveraging techniques from various scientific disciplines such as synthetic biology, next-generation-sequencing and bioinformatics, a system will be designed that is capable of quantifying thousands of regulatory elements such as enhancers, promoters or insulators, in a single experiment and for a specific cell type of interest. The overall goal is to demonstrate feasibility for creating an approach that can be used to study the effects of non-coding loci in neurodegenerative diseases, and to evaluate the contribution of genetic background to regulatory element use.