Our preprint on the dynamics of CTCF/Cohesin loops has been published in Science

Congratulations to Michele, Hugo, and Asmita from the lab and Simon (Mirny lab) on the publication of their preprint in Science!

This was a wonderful collaboration with Christoph Zechner and Leonid Mirny's group as well as former colleagues  Claudia, Gina, and Stanley from Berkeley, where we developed a range of new experimental, microscopy, image analysis, Bayesian inference, and 3D polymer modeling approaches to directly visualize and quantify the dynamics of the structural chromatin loops that fold the human genome into domains.

We show that the chromatin loops formed by CTCF and cohesin are both dynamic and short-lived (~10-30 min median lifetime) and quite rare (only present ~3-6.5% of the time) using  Fbn2 as our model system. This has functional implications for how these loops may regulate downstream processes such as gene expression regulation.

For more information, please see:

• The paper in Science
• A news story written by Anne Trafton for MIT News
• A news story from the Max Planck Institute

A representative movie and summary sketch are further shown below.

Huge credit to Michele, Hugo, Simon, and Asmita for putting all of this together!