Dr. Birnbaum has recently established his lab at the department of Life Sciences, BGU. Dr. Birnbaum has showed that protein-coding sequences could also serve as enhancers that regulate the function of nearby genes, suggesting that a mutation in protein-coding sequences have dual functions – both code for genes and have regulatory functions. Currently, the lab studies the role of gene regulatory elements during development and their association with human diseases. Using advanced sequencing technologies, the Birnbaum lab characterize genome wide novel regulatory elements and their targeted genes in the developing brain and limb (using zebrafish and mouse models). The lab use ChIP-seq and ATAC-seq to identify cell-specific regulatory elements, ChIA-PET to analyze enhancer-promoter interactions and RNA-seq to demonstrate the outcome of interacting regulatory elements with their targeted genes. Finally, the lab embarked on a massively parallel reporter assay that test for the function of thousands of gene regulatory elements in a single experiment.