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David Landsman, PhD

About

Picture of David Landsman, PhD

David Landsman, PhD

Deputy Scientific Director

Chief, Computational Biology Branch

Acting Chief, Computational Health Research Branch

Our research team is interested in data science methods and analytics to better understand our research in chromatin structure and gene regulation.

Contact Information

Building 38A, 8600 Rockville Pike MSC 6075 Bethesda, MD 20894

Tel: 301-435-5981

landsman@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Research Interests

The introduction of modern technologies, such as next generation sequencing (NGS), for DNA sequencing in chromatin structure research has substantially advanced our understanding of nuclear-wide interactions and the effect of post-translational modifications. With very large datasets, new theories on the interactions of chromatin proteins and their effects have been measured across whole genomes, and comparative analyses of wild type and mutant variants have led to a better understanding of the molecular events of chromosome biology. Previously, we have used these published datasets to determine what common features can be mined by asking specific questions related to each dataset or by combining multiple datasets from several laboratories to find common features. These efforts proved to be quite productive, and we decided to make a change to our research program in order to have more interactions with collaborators in wet laboratories. We have concentrated largely on using data produced by our collaborators to analyze their results. We have established interactions with three groups, two at the NIH and one in New York. These interactions have proved to be productive but, more importantly, have been far more satisfying for the members of our research team. Below is a list of recent projects:

Publications

Zhu I, Landsman D. High-resolution map of chromatin accessibility - insights into the focused binding of a large number of transcription factors. Epigenetics Chromatin. 2026 Feb 22;19(1). doi: 10.1186/s13072-026-00665-2. PubMed PMID: 41724964; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC13032593.

Espiritu D, Sheng Y, Peng Y, Ostroverkhova D, Li S, Landsman D, Aristizabal MJ, Panchenko AR. Cancer histone mutations impact protein binding and DNA repair with possible links to genomic instability. Nucleic Acids Res. 2025 Sep 5;53(17). doi: 10.1093/nar/gkaf899. PubMed PMID: 40966522; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC12448811.

Galperin MY, Vera Alvarez R, Karamycheva S, Makarova KS, Wolf YI, Landsman D, Koonin EV. COG database update 2024. Nucleic Acids Res. 2025 Jan 6;53(D1):D356-D363. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkae983. PubMed PMID: 39494517; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC11701660.

Zhou BR, Feng H, Huang F, Zhu I, Portillo-Ledesma S, Shi D, Zaret KS, Schlick T, Landsman D, Wang Q, Bai Y. Structural insights into the cooperative nucleosome recognition and chromatin opening by FOXA1 and GATA4. Mol Cell. 2024 Aug 22;84(16):3061-3079.e10. doi: 10.1016/j.molcel.2024.07.016. Epub 2024 Aug 8. PubMed PMID: 39121853; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC11344660.

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