Congratulations to Hugo and Michele on the publication of their co-written review in Current Opinion in Cell Biology. They discuss how Super-Resolution Live-Cell Imaging (SRLCI) can be used to track long-range chromatin interactions such as Enhancer-Promoter interactions and CTCF loops. They also discuss how to design such SRLCI experiments and highlight the associated technical challenges and pitfalls. Seeing is believing and the future of disentangling the function of the 3D genome is bright!

We are pleased to join the MIT Summer Research Program for the Summer of 2021. This program is fully paid and provides opportunities for undergraduates to come and do research at MIT for a summer. You can find more information on how to apply here. The MSRP Mission is:The MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP) seeks to promote the value of graduate education; to improve the research enterprise through increased diversity; and to prepare and recruit the best and brightest for graduate education at MIT.
MSRP began in 1986 as an institutional effort to address the issue of underrepresentation of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Puerto Ricans in engineering and science in the United States. Today, this program’s goal is to increase the number of underrepresented minorities and underserved (e.g. low socio-economic background, first generation) students in the research enterprise.
MSRP seeks to identify talented sophomores, juniors, and non-graduating seniors who might benefit from spending a summer on MIT’s campus, conducting research under the guidance of MIT faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students.
Students who participate in this program will be better prepared and motivated to pursue advanced degrees, thereby helping to sustain a rich talent pool in critical areas of research and innovation.

We celebrated the end of our lab renovations with a delicious lunch from Mae's and with lab photos, professionally taken by Michele (we missed you, Shdema & Denise)! Our tissue culture room is now up and running with four biosafety cabinets. Our microscope rooms are ready and the rest of the lab has been spruced up too. It has been 19 months of planning and renovations and we are thrilled that our space is finally ready.

We are very grateful to the NIH for awarding us an NIH Director's New Innovator Award (MIT press release; NIH press release). This award will support our synthetic 3D genome biology research program with $2,318,250 over the next 5 years, and it is funded by the NIH Common Fund. A list of all the awardees - which include our MIT colleagues Tami Lieberman and Michael Birnbaum - can be found here. Thank you, NIH!

The first review paper from the lab has now been published Open Access in WIREs Developmental Biology.

Viraat reviewed the development of chromosome conformation capture technologies, giving a historical account and discussing the insights into 3D genome structure and function that were gleaned from the application of these methods.

Viraat also placed special emphasis on Micro-C, a new technology for mapping 3D genome structure at unprecedented resolution and which is especially sensitive to transcriptionally relevant features of genome structure.

Congratulations to Viraat!