Albert Erives (born March 4, 1972) is a developmental geneticist who studies transcriptional enhancers underlying animal development and diseases of development (cancers). Erives also proposed the pacRNA model for the dual origin of the genetic code and universal homochirality. He is known for work at the intersection of genetics, evolution, developmental biology, and gene regulation. He has worked at the California Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, and Dartmouth College, and is an associate professor at the University of Iowa. Erives has shown how genes of the nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses inform on intermediate steps in the evolution of the linear, chromatinized eukaryotic chromosome and its mechanisms of gene regulation. Regulatory grammars of enhancers Erives' major work is on “regulatory grammars” for transcriptional enhancers underlying animal development and cancer diseases. Exploiting assemblies for animal genomes, Erives discovered complex gene regulatory codes underlie non-homologous subsets of mechanistically equivalent enhancers. These codes are composed of a combinatorial “lexicon” of transcription factor (TF) binding sites, functional inflections of those binding sites (so-called “specialized sites” constrained for binding affinity and competition by multiple TFs), and complex site ordering (orientation and positional spacing of those sites). The relationship of these complex regulatory codes within a nucleosomal "regulatory reading frame" is a key goal. His lab's work also elucidated how a mutational mechanism (microsatellite repeat slippage) plays a significant evolutionary role in functionally adjusting complex binding site arrangements that recruit poly-glutamine rich factors. Correspondingly, Erives lab has pioneered the identification of novel poly-glutamine complex recruiting enhancers that integrate developmental signals, while also identifying polyQ allelic series for key developmental factors targeting those enhancers. A significant implication of this work is that gene regulatory networks largely evolve by indels in both cis and trans (in enhancer DNAs and polyQ-encoding genes, respectively). As indels are largely produced by unstable microsatellite repeats, which are fast-evolving and difficult to genotype accurately, a large compartment of functional genetic variation is not treated by genome-wide association studies, which focus on single nucleotide polymorphisms and at most a subset of non-repeat associated indels. Molecular determinants of morphogenic responses Erives and colleagues determined how different morphogen gradient responses are encoded in DNA sequence. They did so by using diverse Drosophila species that have different sized eggs to study how a set of structured enhancers would have co-evolved or co-adapted to changes in the concentration gradients. Morphogen gradient systems are a core fundamental subject