A really cool preprint from Joanna Wysocka's lab showing that housekeeping genes use distal enhancers as dosage buffers against TF fluctuations, but only during critical cell fate transitions. Makes so much sense! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Enhancer buffering protects dosage-sensitive housekeeping genes during vulnerable developmental transitions

Housekeeping genes maintain robust expression across cell types despite dynamic transcription factor fluctuations, yet their haploinsufficiency is associated with many tissue-specific developmental di...

biorxiv.org

Very happy to see this story finally out (link in comments)! We used low-input Capture Hi-C to profile promoter-anchored chromosomal interactions in Type 3 innate lymphoid cells (ILC3s) - rare tissue-resident lymphocytes that lack antigen receptors and regulate barrier immunity.

MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences@mrc-lms.bsky.social · yesterday

New research published today in Nature Genetics uses a technique called mini-Capture Hi-C to map 3D DNA folding in rare ILC3 immune cells, linking 100+ genes to immune disease risk in this cell type 🧬

Now out from Bintu lab: compaction following transient KRAB recruitment tracks long-term epigenetic memory. But K9me3 decays after KRAB release and is replaced by DNA methylation. Does compaction help maintain K9me3, or slow its loss enough to facilitate the handoff to DNAme? tinyurl.com/ycay4mrh

Single-cell chromatin state transitions during epigenetic memory formation

Large-scale chromatin compaction quantitatively predicts the percentage of cells with durable epigenetic memory of gene silencing.

tinyurl.com

I am very excited to share the work of my PhD with @eddaschulz.bsky.social, now on BioRxiv! 🎉 🧵⬇️ (1/9) How does the transcription↔️chromatin crosstalk ensure monoallelic expression?

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · last wk.

Transcription-dependent heterochromatin at the Xist promoter shapes the random choice of the inactive X chromosome https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.22.737064v1

Our preprint is now out in @natgenet.nature.com ! doi.org/10.1038/s415... We measured Sox2 promoter bursting dynamics with the SCR enhancer positioned at different distances within a genomic locus devoid of confounding effects in mESC: Main findings in the 🧵 below:

Enhancer control of promoter activity and variability via frequency modulation of clustered transcriptional bursts - Nature Genetics

Tünnermann et al. use live-cell imaging to study promoter activity under the control of an enhancer inserted at different genomic distances. RNA production from the promoter occurs in clusters of tran...

doi.org

Luca Giorgetti lab @FMI@lucagiorgetti.bsky.social · last yr.

Celebrating 10 years of our lab with a new preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How does enhancer location within a TAD control transcriptional bursts from a cognate promoter? Experiments by Jana Tünnermann and modelling by Gregory Roth

(1/10) The majority of human genetic variation is located in non-coding regions. The great challenge of the post-genomic era is to assign function to these variants. We reasoned that combining haplotyping with allele-specific multiomics can help pinpoint the functional ones: rdcu.be/fgr5W. A thread:

Mapping functional non-coding variation in individual human genomes through haplotyping, multiomics, and deep learning

Nature Communications - How non-coding mutations in DNA contribute to phenotypes is a largely unresolved question. Here the authors integrate personal genomics and machine learning to identify...

rdcu.be

Hey #nucleus nerds, the JCS Special Issue on the Cell Biology of the Nucleus is now live! This was a pleasure to co-edit with Megan King @luskinglab.bsky.social.

Journal of Cell Science@jcellsci.bsky.social · last mo.

Our Special Issue: Cell Biology of the Nucleus is complete Explore our Toc: journals.biologists.com/jcs/issue/13... Our cover image shows the posteriorly positioned nuclei (Nup50-mCherry - pink) of notochord cells in Ciona embryos. See article by Peng et al. journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

Does every enhancer work with every promoter? With @jengreitz.bsky.social and Will Greenleaf, we revisit this long-debated question and resolve an outstanding contradiction in the field. A tour 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Intrinsic promoter responsiveness dictates sensitivity to transcriptional activation by enhancers

Enhancers activate specific target promoters, but whether intrinsic enhancer-promoter compatibility contributes to this specificity is debated. Recent studies using different reporter assays have reac...

biorxiv.org

If the genome is not a blueprint, what is it? My attempt to unravel this particularly knotty question, in @quantamagazine.bsky.social www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-huma...

Why the Human Genome’s Tangled Physicality May Confound AI | Quanta Magazine

Our genetic heritage is not a blueprint or an algorithm, as many biologists have imagined, but something else entirely.

quantamagazine.org

JIT 4 summer, the latest preprint from our lab, brilliantly led by @kaitezhang.bsky.social w/ support from Collepardo lab (@juliamaristany.bsky.social / @janhuemar.bsky.social). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... describes a new single-molecule epigenomic method, & discoveries it enables ... (1/n)

Single-molecule nucleosome spacing coordinates chromatin fiber interactions

Nucleosome spacing influences higher-order chromatin fiber organization in vitro but how this relates to cellular chromosome structure remains contentious. To address this, we developed Ligation Analy...

biorxiv.org

🚨Preprint Drop🚨 We are very pleased to release our study on DNA methylation dynamics at enhancers during ESC differentiation! This work was led by Marlet Morales-Franco and Priscillia Lhoumaud 🧵(1/13) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Dual profiling of DNA modifications with enhancer features during the exit of naive pluripotency

Cis-regulatory elements, such as enhancers, play an essential role in coordinating gene expression programs during cellular transitions. As such, substantial efforts have been made to characterize enh...

biorxiv.org

1/🧵 Can transcription factor condensate formation be explained without phase separation? Our new preprint introduces SPARK, a simulation tool that reproduces condensate behavior (clustering, fusion, FRAP) from diffusion & binding kinetics alone. Movie: 60 sec FRAP sim www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I'm excited to share that our work studying gene dosage response curves (GDRCs) is now out in Cell Genomics (@cellpress.bsky.social). www.cell.com/cell-genomic... [1/n]

Buffering of gene dosage response curves for human complex traits

Milind et al. explore why loss-of-function variants and duplications tend to have average effects in the same direction on 94 complex traits. Using gene dosage response curves (GDRCs), they gather evi...

cell.com

📣 Preprint alert! We developed a method to analyze concurrent interactions between multiple chromatin regions at single alleles at sub-nucleosome resolution (multi-way Micro-Capture-C, mwMCC) & used this to study structural synergy within super-enhancers. 1/14 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Beautiful new study from @elphegenoralab.bsky.social and Leonid Mirny's lab: Cohesin-bridged encounters mediate enhancer-promoter communication, predicting how enhancer effect scales with genomic distance and - for the first time - how CTCF sites modulate enhancer-promoter communciation! 🧵 below

Elphege Nora Lab at UCSF@elphegenoralab.bsky.social · 3mo ago

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 🧪 🧵👇

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 🧪 🧵👇

Is distal gene activation by enhancers inherently different from promoter-proximal activation? We propose not. But both cohesin and cooperativity are important aspects of how transcription is affected. Happy to share our recent preprint (thread below) 1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Did you know that Pierre Chambon's laboratory was the first to use the term "nucleosome" in 1975 ? www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Although cohesin-sensitive, long-range enhancer activation is equivalent in nature to proximal activation. Cooperativity can arise from different levels of activation inputs operating on a non-linear response function. @eliasfriman.bsky.social @uoe-igc.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excited to share our first story led by @martinacapriati.bsky.social! How do cells control the expression of viability genes? We find that single transcription factors can drive both chromatin opening and gene activation from densely co-bound CpG island promoters, including at essential genes

how does loop extrusion and chromatid cohesion interact in interphase? Find out in our latest collaboration with Gerlich lab | | | vvv

Gerlich Lab@gerlichlab.bsky.social · 3mo ago

New preprint out!🧬 How do cells keep replicated sister chromatids linked for DNA repair while folding 3D loops for gene expression? Extrusion folds DNA but separates sisters, while cohesion connects them, risking mutual interference. How do they coexist?🧵👇 🔗 doi.org/10.64898/2026.05.02.722390 1/6

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

Hey y’all 👋 repost magic appreciated. The Solecki lab is recruiting multiple postdocs at St. Jude for a chromatin imaging project at the edge of live-cell imaging, neuronal cell biology, chromatin regulation, and quantitative image analysis. Ever dreamed of touring chromatin like this? We CAN 🔥

This a very important, and extremely well-executed study from Ralph Grand’s group @uniheidelberg.bsky.social. Congrats to all the authors! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

But wait! There’s more! So you thought you knew nucleosome structure? Think again! @vram142.bsky.social @gladstoneinst.bsky.social and @genophoria.bsky.social @arcinstitute.org show that there is plenty of distortion largely due to TFs butting in 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

📖 The final version of our paper is out in press Cohesin cofactor dosage sets the rate of loop extrusion, rendering genome folding tunable yet vulnerable to genetic disruption authors.elsevier.com/a/1m%7EU03vV... or www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Cohesin cofactor dosage sets the rate of loop extrusion, rendering genome folding tunable yet vulnerable to genetic disruption

Shah, Tortora, et al. show that cells can dial the rate of cohesin loop extrusion by balancing the relative dosage of NIPBL and PDS5. Their models provide a quantitative mechanistic basis for the gene...

cell.com

Elphege Nora Lab at UCSF@elphegenoralab.bsky.social · 12mo ago

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...

New paper in Genes & Dev: we dissected how Sox2 — a key pluripotency TF — is regulated by a distal enhancer cluster (SCR) 100 kb away. The results challenge simple models of cohesin-mediated loop extrusion of gene regulation. genesdev.cshlp.org/content/earl... 🧵

We are so excited to see our work out in @nature.com! We present a multi-omic single-cell atlas of 12 organs in human fetal development, explore the enhancer landscape, use deep learning to infer rules of transcription factor activity, and interpret non-coding variants in complex traits: #GeneReg 🧬🖥️

John Greally@greally.bsky.social · 4mo ago

This @anshulkundaje.bsky.social, Kyle Fahr and William Greenleaf paper is finally out, we've been following it for a while in its preprint form, phenomenal work. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

First first-author paper out! 🎉 We show that the classically repressive mark H3K27me3 can be linked to active transcription through a newly identified reader complex 🤯 Really grateful to everyone involved in this project during my PhD! Thread below 👇

@sandraduharcourt.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Our latest publication is now out at Genome Biology! link.springer.com/article/10.1... We uncover a unique association between a H3K27me3 reader complex and active transcription. A thread with our key findings: (1/8) #TEsky #Polycomb #transcription #smallRNAs

Our H1 paper is out #ScienceAdvances: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @masaashimazoe.bsky.social et al. reveal that linker histone H1 acts as a liquid-like glue to organize chromatin in live cells. 🎉 Fantastic collab with @rcollepardo.bsky.social @janhuemar.bsky.social and others—huge thanks! 🙌 1/