We all got together for the microscopy bootcamp. We began with two hours of lectures from Domenic and Maxine covered  the 4f microscope, ray tracing, diffraction, Fourier transforms, and basic optics theory and then moved on to current research topics including super-resolution, MINFLUX, light sheet microscope and other topics. 

We then went down to the optics teaching labs normally used for the 20.309 course that Anders has co-taught with Maxine Jonas and Steve Wasserman. The optics labs are free during the Summer, so we got together in groups and built a fluorescence microscope. 

We could even see the DNA loci that we recently imaged using lattice lightsheet microscopy on the simply microscope we built in the labs. 

Congratulations to Varshini on her new preprint, describing the discovery of Matchmaker elements: cis-regulatory elements that load cohesin to promote looping among neighboring enhancers, promoters, and CTCF sites. 
This has been a very close collaboration with Vijay Sankaran and lab and Chun-Jie from the Sankaran lab is co-lead author and with many people internally in the lab including Masahiro, Viraat and Clarice as well as with Zuzana Tothova's lab. 

You can read the full paper on BioRxiv. 

We celebrated Varshini with a Picnic at the Cambridge Common:

Congratulations to Varshini on her recently published collaborative paper with the teams of Brad Bernstein and Liz Gaskell from the Broad Institute. 

We are very happy to welcome Benson as the new Tech Associate in the lab. Benson joined us recently from Tuft University. 

Congratulations to Masahiro on the publication of his collaborative paper with the Wysocka Lab at Stanford on promoter competition, showing that at the Sox2 locus promoter competition can be explained to a large extent by RCMC-measured changes in insulation. Read the full paper in Nature Genetics.

We get a lot of requests for help with Region Capture Micro-C (RCMC) and genome-wide Micro-C, so led by Miles we have put together a comprehensive protocol for both including small adjustments and improvements since our 2023 paper first reporting RCMC. 

Please find the protocol now published in Nature Protocols. 

We also have a GitHub repo with a user-friendly end-to-end computational pipeline for Micro-C and RCMC processing and analysis, which you can find on GitHub. 

A big thank you and farewell to Allison, who is off to Columbia University for graduate school.

We celebrated and said goodbye to Allison with a lab dinner at Five Spices House. All the best for Columbia Allison and come back and visit!

Congratulations to James on the publication of the absolute quantification of looping paper now out in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.

This has been in collaboration with the Giorgetti, Zechner, and Mirny labs. We now have genome-wide estimates of absolute looping probabilities (e.g. this loop is looped 5% of the time) for the first time. 

See also the very thoughtful News and Views article from Henggeler and Ochs. 

Congratulations to Harvey, Henrik, Jack and also Miles, James, Christos and Jacob on the synEP paper coming online on BioRxiv. This has been a major project and a close collaboration with the Leonid Mirny and Christoph Zechner. 

We attempted to answer the foundational question: How do enhancers and promoters interact in time and space using a synthetic biology approach and our answer is transient contacts. 

You can read the full paper here https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.21.733446v1.full . We celebrated the paper and the summer with a BBQ.