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!