We are happy to share our new preprint led by collaborators from Berkeley, Tsung-Han Stanley Hsieh, Claudia Cattoglio, Elena Slobodyanyuk (now MIT Biology), wherein we combine acute protein depletion methods with high-resolution Micro-C and super-resolution microscopy to study the role of key 3D genome regulators - CTCF, Cohesin, WAPL, and YY1 - in regulating Enhancer-Promoter (E-P) interactions. Surprisingly, none of these factors are required for the short-term maintenance of E-P interactions except for a handful of genes/loci. These results are consistent with a "time-buffering" model where these architectural factors may play a role in the establishment (and perhaps long-term maintenance) of E-P interactions and gene expression programs, but where these architectural proteins play essentially no role in the short-term maintenance of E-P interactions.
The preprint can be found on BioRxiv.

This week we are excited to welcome Emma Magee to the lab. Emma joins us as a Technical Associate, having previously worked as a Research Associate at the Broad Institute on developing methods for simultaneously measuring protein and gene expression levels in single cells.

Emma will be working with Miles and in collaboration with Fei Chen's lab at the Broad/Harvard on developing new genome-editing and imaging methods.

Welcome Emma!

Thank you to The Alexander and Margaret Stewart Trust and the Pew Foundation for funding our work on enhancer dysregulation in cancer.

We are very happy to join the 2021 class of Pew-Stewart Scholars and begin the work.

More information can be found here.

This week we are welcoming Isadora De Abreu, who is joining us for the summer as part of the MRSP summer program. Isodora is currently an undergraduate at Nova Southeastern University and will be working with Michele on turning our stem cells into neurons. Welcome Isadora!

Thank you to the G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Foundation for funding our grant "Enhancer Dysregulation in Neurodevelopmental Disorders" to support Michele's work on understanding the molecular basis for a neurodevelopmental disorder for 2021-2023

Congratulations to Miles and Michele on being awarded post-doc fellowships to support their research!

Michele has been awarded the American-Italian Cancer Foundation's Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship for 2021/22.

Miles will likely have to choose between two fellowships, including the EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship.

We have a new R33 grant. Thanks to the National Cancer Institute’s IMAT (Innovate Molecular Analysis Technologies) of the NIH for funding Shdema’s work on how focal amplifications of MYC enhancers cause oncogene overexpression in cancer. Our project “Super-Resolution Microscopy for Dynamic Analysis of Focal Enhancer Amplifications in Cancer” was awarded $1,143,925 over the next 3 years (2021-2024). Thanks NCI and NIH!