Dr Touati Benoukraf’s research focus is the role of non-coding segments of the genome in order to identify novel regulatory elements such as enhancers or silencers with the aim of understanding their function in human physiology and pathology. More specifically, he uses epigenetic marks and transcription factor binding site datasets derived from high-throughput sequencing technologies to annotate and predict the function of these uncharacterized loci. This information allows the investigation of genomic and epigenomic aberrations in cancers beyond genes and the delineation of novel disease-related signaling pathways. Dr Benoukraf has developed several open source software applications to manage large epigenetic datasets and one of his contributions in this field was to describe the association between histone post-translational modifications and enhancer activities which enables the prediction of enhancer states from in vivo epigenetic data.