Congratulations to Viraat and Harvey for receiving graduate fellowships.
We are thrilled to share our new preprint Region Capture Micro-C reveals coalescence of enhancers and promoters into nested microcompartments. We develop a new chromosome conformation capture method that we call Region Capture Micro-C (RCMC). With RCMC we generate the deepest 3D genome maps thus far and reveal new insights into the mechanisms of enhancer-promoter and promoter-promoter interactions. These interactions can be seen as "dots" in the contact maps below:  Please read the preprint for the full story. And huge congratulations to Viraat and Miles for putting this together.
 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:
A representative movie and summary sketch are further shown below.  Huge credit to Michele, Hugo, Simon, and Asmita for putting all of this together!  |
Hansen Lab at MIT, Building 56, Room 722, 32 Vassar St, Cambridge, MA 02139; Accessibility