We are thrilled to welcome Clarice Hong to the lab as a new post-doc.

Clarice recently completed her PhD at WashU in St Louis with Barak Cohen in Molecular Genetics and Genomics, where she did some beautiful work using massively parallel reporter assays to understand the genomic environmental effects on core promoters, how gene expression noise is regulated, and the strength of insulators.

Welcome Clarice!

We are thrilled to welcome James Jusuf to the lab.
James joins us from MIT's Biological Engineering graduate program. Prior to that, James received an undergraduate degree in Physics from Caltech and carried out research on gene regulation, synthetic biology, super-resolution microscopy, and much more.

Welcome James!

The Micro-C AID paper is now online in Nature Genetics.

Using Micro-C to profile 3D genome structure after acute loss of cohesin, CTCF, WAPL, and YY1, we found that enhancer-promoter interactions are surprisingly robust to these perturbations, at least at short timescales.

This is consistent with enhancer-promoter interactions forming through a (micro)-compartmentalization mechanism as we also found in our recent Region-Capture Micro-C preprint.

We suggest a time-buffering model where CTCF and cohesin may be more important for establishing enhancer-promoter interactions than for maintaining them. Read the full paper at Nature Genetics.

Congratulations to Jamie on the publication of their preview in Molecular Cell.

Jamie previewed an interesting new article from Guo*, Al-Jibury*, Garcia-Millan*, ..., Pruessner, Merkenschlager Chromatin jets define the properties of cohesin-driven in vivo loop extrusion in Molecular Cell that reports the identification of "chromatin jets" - stripes orthogonal to the main diagonal in Hi-C maps, indicative of targeted loading of cohesin at sites.

Chromatin jets provide direct evidence of targeted cohesin loading and helps constrain possible extrusion parameters in vivo.

Check out Jamie's preview here.

And check out the article here.