@gersteinlab.bsky.social

During our recent lab roster meeting, we asked about everyone's AI chatbot preferences (n=69, multi-select): 🥇 Claude — 49 (71%) 🥈 ChatGPT — 43 (62%) 🥉 Gemini — 14 (20%) Takeaway: Mostly Claude + ChatGPT co-usage, with Gemini as a distant third and a long tail of niche tools.

Curious how pseudogenes are transcriptionally regulated? Our new Genome Research paper shows processed pseudogenes break the rules: they’re transcribed without classic epigenetic marks, linked to enhancers, and enriched for YY1 motifs. Study co-led by Yunzhe Jiang and @beaborsari.bsky.social

Epigenetic characterization of pseudogenes across human tissues

Pseudogenes have historically been regarded as nonfunctional remnants of genome evolution. However, relative to other noncoding genomic elements, their promoter architecture and epigenetic regulation remain incompletely understood. Here, we systematically characterize pseudogene promoters and compare them with those of protein-coding genes and long noncoding RNAs. To do this, we integrate matched transcriptomic and epigenomic data across 26 human tissues from the EN-TEx (ENCODE-GTEx) project. We uniformly annotate promoters with chromatin features (histone modifications, chromatin accessibility, and DNA methylation), sequence motifs, and evolutionary conservation, generating an online catalog. Leveraging this catalog, we show that, across multiple tissues, transcribed, unprocessed pseudogenes exhibit chromatin patterns similar to those of active protein-coding genes. In contrast, transcribed, processed pseudogenes show a different pattern: most lack the canonical hallmarks of transcription (e.g., active histone marks) at their promoters. Instead, their promoters show increased overlap with LINE elements, enrichment for YY1-like binding motifs, and higher Hi-C contact frequency, particularly with distal enhancer-like regulatory regions. Together with their greater conservation (relative to unprocessed pseudogenes), these features suggest that the transcription of processed pseudogenes may require regulatory mechanisms distinct from canonical promoter-associated epigenetic activation.

doi.org

Our new PNAS study bridges histology and genomics. Using deep learning and imageQTL analysis, we show how tissue images reflect gene expression and aging — making histology more interpretable with AI. By RanMeng, W. Zhu, C. Cameron, P. Ni, X. Zhou, T. Ulammandakh, and @markgerstein.bsky.social

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

pnas.org

📚 Yale students have returned to campus, so time for a roster meeting! We again made our Nobel Prize predictions (given how accurate we were last year 😉) 🥇Our top prediction is Habener & Knudsen (GLP-1) with 28.5% of the vote! 🥈 In second is Rothberg & David Klenerman (NGS)

🧠 At our recent Gerstein Lab roster meeting, we took a detour into… personality science! Turns out we’re INT Central 🧪 📌 70% Introverts 📌 83% Intuitives 📌 57% Thinkers Analysts (INTP, INTJ) dominate, far more than the U.S. baseline. #MBTI #INTP #INTJ

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