Dr Kanhere’s research interest in transcription regulation stems from work during her PhD where she analysed common structural themes in bacterial promoters and proposed a novel methodology for promoter prediction in prokaryotes. Wishing to understand whether such rules apply to transcription regulation in eukaryotic genomes, she carried out research at Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin and University College London. During this period, she worked on next-generation techniques like ChIP-seq and RNA-seq. Here, she combined her computational biology expertise as well as molecular biology techniques, which led to discovery of a new class of short non-coding RNA and other gene regulatory elements with important role in cell development. In mid-2012 she joined University of Birmingham to start her own group.

Noncoding RNA localisation mechanisms in chromatin regulation.Kanhere A, Jenner RG.Silence. 2012 3:2. Short RNAs are transcribed from repressed polycomb target genes and interact with polycomb repressive complex-2.Kanhere A, Viiri K, Araújo CC, Rasaiyaah J, Bouwman RD, Whyte WA, Pereira CF, Brookes E, Walker K, Bell GW, Pombo A, Fisher AG, Young RA, Jenner RG.Mol Cell. 2010 38:675-88. CpG-depleted promoters harbor tissue-specific transcription factor binding signals--implications for motif overrepresentation analyses.Roider HG, Lenhard B, Kanhere A, Haas SA, Vingron M.Nucleic Acids Res. 2009 37:6305-15. Predicting transcription factor affinities to DNA from a biophysical model.Roider HG, Kanhere A, Manke T, Vingron M.Bioinformatics. 2007 23:134-41. Structural properties of promoters: similarities and differences between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.Kanhere A, Bansal M.Nucleic Acids Res. 2005 33:3165-75. A novel method for prokaryotic promoter prediction based on DNA stability.Kanhere A, Bansal M.BMC Bioinformatics. 2005 6:1.