Honored to be among this year’s DP2 recipients

UCSF@ucsanfrancisco.bsky.social · 4w ago

Congratulations to four UCSF faculty named 2026 NIH New Innovators. Josiah Gerdts, Mark Pownall, Sakeen Kashem, and Balyn Zaro will each receive $2M+ over five years to pursue high-risk, high-reward research. https://ow.ly/9UGi50ZVFoy

❗Postdoc positions available! We have multiple fully funded openings in the lab - please reach out if you’re interested. I’ll be at CSHL Epigenetics and Chromatin this week, so come find me if you’d like to learn more about the lab or potential projects

First preprint from the lab 🚨 We asked when and how global chromatin organization emerges during early development 🐟

bioRxiv Developmental Biology@biorxiv-devbio.bsky.social · 3mo ago

RNA-dependent chromatin organization during development https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.14.744931v1

Next summer's Epigenetics GRC (I'm co-chairing with Deborah Bouch'is) is shaping up nicely with an all-star lineup of speakers working on a broad range of organisms and systems and everything from molecular mechanisms to new phenomena. Apply and put it on your calendar! www.grc.org/epigenetics-...

Why can't we explain enhancer action despite 2 decades of chromosome conformation technologies? 😬 Our new study spearheaded by Leonid Mirny's group points to a flaw in our assumptions, and to a solution from physical principles By @timothyfoldes.bsky.social 💻& @karissalhansen.bsky.social 🧪 🧵👇

Delighted to share our lab's latest (w/ inimitable @genophoria.bsky.social) in final form at @nature.com. Enormous lift by Sean Wang, @palindromephd.bsky.social & @martyyang.bsky.social to address extensive & constructive reviewer comments & see this through. (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Pervasive and programmed nucleosome distortion on single chromatin fibres - Nature

An analytical pipeline called Iteratively Defined Lengths of Inaccessibility (IDLI) maps the genome-wide occupancy of a range of nucleosome types and shows that most nucleosomes exhibit programmed ‘di...

nature.com

Excited to share my PhD work! The question: How is genome organization established? Here, we developed a low-input Micro-C method, Pico-C, and used it to map chromatin architecture across early stages of fly development. Here’s a quick Blue-torial 🙂 (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Three-dimensional genome reorganization foreshadows zygotic genome activation in Drosophila - Nature Genetics

Pico-C, a low-input Micro-C approach, reveals that dynamic three-dimensional genome folding precedes zygotic genome activation in Drosophila.

nature.com

Our Mini Review went online last night in Current Opinion in Genetics & Development "Block copolymer concepts of how transcription organizes the stem cell genome" doi.org/10.1016/j.gd... Fig. 1: Stem cell–typical organization of the genome and transcription, and the block copolymer sorting concept.

@science.org 🧬🔬 Multiscale structure of #chromatin condensates explains phase separation and material properties | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @janhuemar.bsky.social et al.

Multiscale structure of chromatin condensates explains phase separation and material properties

The structure and interaction networks of molecules within biomolecular condensates are poorly understood. Using cryo–electron tomography and molecular dynamics simulations, we elucidated the structur...

science.org

Here is a copy of last year's Twitter thread explaining our preprint - jump to (21) for the new stuff 👀 Synergy between cis-regulatory elements can render cohesin dispensable for distal enhancer function now revised and journal accepted at www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧵👇

New preprint with @gfudenberg.bsky.social We find the rate of cohesin loop extrusion in cells is set by NIPBL dosage and tunes many aspects of chromosome folding. This provides a molecular basis for NIPBL haploinsufficiency in humans. 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

NIPBL dosage shapes genome folding by tuning the rate of cohesin loop extrusion

Cohesin loop extrusion is a major driver of chromosome folding, but how its dynamics are controlled to shape the genome remains elusive. Here we disentangle the contributions of the cohesin cofactors ...

biorxiv.org

Our first expansion microscopy results. Imaged today on "normal" Zeiss LSM 900, revealing chromatin and RNA polymerase II clusters at an unreal level of detail. Our PhD student @mofrawe.bsky.social learned the protocol from amazing @mpownall.bsky.social 🙏 Months of preparation are paying off now!

Another paper bluetorial! Today: how does the spatial location of genes influence their function? (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The nuclear periphery confers repression on H3K9me2-marked genes and transposons to shape cell fate - Nature Cell Biology

Marin et al. report the role of lamin proteins and the lamin B receptor (LBR) in chromatin positioning at the nuclear periphery. Knockout of all lamins and LBR in mouse embryonic stem cells leads to h...

nature.com

Excited to share our new paper in @cp-molcell.bsky.social Molecular Cell: "Catalytic-dependent and independent functions of the histone acetyltransferase CBP promote pioneer-factor-mediated zygotic genome activation" — the big part of my PhD! www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Catalytic-dependent and independent functions of the histone acetyltransferase CBP promote pioneer-factor-mediated zygotic genome activation

Marsh, Pirogov, et al. use the early Drosophila embryo to demonstrate that the conserved histone acetyltransferase CBP is required for pioneer-factor-mediated transcriptional activation of the zygotic...

cell.com

First paper from the Pownall lab calls for a first post on bluesky! Check out our mini review on nanoscale imaging of the nucleus in vivo. We are excited to address some of these open questions and technical challenges through future work from the lab—stay tuned! portlandpress.com/biochemsoctr...

Microscopy methods for the in vivo study of nanoscale nuclear organization

Eukaryotic genomes are highly compacted within the nucleus and organized into complex 3D structures across various genomic and physical scales. Organization within the nucleus plays a key role in gene...

portlandpress.com