Congratulations to Matteo, Doemnic and Simon on the publication of their MINFLUX paper now out in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. Thanks also to Jessica Matthias from Abberior for a wonderful collaboration and for all her expertise on MINFLUX and to Tatiana Karpova for hosting us and collaborating at NIH. 

The paper also has a new title since the original preprint which was called Chromatin Dynamics are Highly Subdiffusive Across Seven Orders of Magnitude. 

Thanks also to Anne Trafton for writing a very nice news piece about the paper for MIT News. 

Congratulations to Harvey on the publication of his collaborative paper with the Blobel and Zhang labs, where he contributed key polymer simulations to the study on the cohesin and loop extrusion dependence for reforming enhancer-promoter loops de novo after mitosis. You can read the full paper in Nature Genetics. 

Congratulations to Sumin and Miles on the publication of their review on Polycomb-mediated 3D chromatin organization in Current Opinion - you can read it here. 

Congratulations to Masahiro, whose collaborative work with the Seychelle Vos and Lucas Farnung labs is now on BioRxiv. Cryo-EM revealed that CTCF dimerization promotes olgiomerization of nucleosomes into higher order structures. Mutations in Zinc Fingers 6,7,8 that disrupt dimerization lead to growth defects, disrupt germ cell differentiation, and leads to disrupted CTCF-CTCF looping in cells. You can read the full preprint on BioRxiv. 

Our R01 grant with Gerd Blobel from University of Pennsylvania/CHOP that we originally submitted in 2024 is now funded and can be found on NIH Reporter. 
We have been collaborating with Gerd's lab for a few years now. One project focused on 3D genome reconfiguration during the mitosis-to-G1 transition, leading to the discovery that microcompartments are present in mitotic chromosomes (mitotic chromosomes were previously thought to be without patterned 3D structure), which was recently published (see also independent study from Job Dekker reporting similar findings). Another project focused on LDB1, revealing that LDB1 form E-P loops that are largely independent of loop extrusion and was also recently published. And there is much more to come. 

Thank you NIH and NHGRI for funding this continued collaboration!

Find the full preprint on BioRxiv. 

We celebrated the 6 year birthday of the lab (started Feb 1st, 2020) by painting pottery at the Clay Room in Brookline!

We are excited to welcome 4 new lab members.

​Carolina Kusumanegara and Mira Chandrakasan are both MIT undergraduates who have joined us for UROP projects. 

Xu Yan and Steven Solar are both from Harvard. Xu is a Msc student in Computational Biology and Quantitative Genetics. Steven is an MD student in the Harvard-MIT HST program. 

​Welcome to lab! We are excited to work with you. 

We had a wonderful time celebrating together at our lab’s holiday party, enjoying good company, good food, and plenty of laughter. Grateful for a great year and an even better team!