We are sad to say goodbye to Daria Sels, who visited the lab for 9 months as a Master's student from Belgium, but we wish you all the best for your upcoming travel and your future PhD!
Congratulations to Viraat on his collaborative paper with Nick Aboreden and Gerd Blobel, where he used RCMC to show that LDB1 is a true looping factor. You can read the full paper in Molecular Cell.
 The lab turned 5 years old on Feb 1st, 2025. To celebrate, we went candlepin bowling in Southie!
Congratulations to James on his new preprint in collaboration with Simon, Michele, Pia, and Ilya among our lab and the Zechner, Giorgetti, and Mirny labs. You can find the preprint on BioRxiv.
3D Genomics methods such as Hi-C and Micro-C can identify many thousands of loops across the genome, but all the quantifications are relative. By integrating super-resolution live-cell imaging with Micro-C and new computational methods, James now reports absolute quantification of chromatin loops for the first time (as in, e.g. this loop is present 3% of the time). Across the genome, James finds loops to be generally rare with implications for gene regulation and the mechanisms of enhancer-promoter interactions. Congratulations to James!
Congratulations to Domenic, who's preprint on the TF ZNF143/ZFP143 has come out in Molecular Cell.
ZNF143 was reported to be a major looping factor that forms chromatin loops either by itself or with CTCF, but Domenic found that this is not the case. Instead, ZNF143 is a transcription factor that binds promoters to activate the expression of some ribosomal and mitochondrial genes. Domenic's paper was co-submitted and co-published with a paper from Elzo de Wit's lab who independently also found that ZNF143 is not a looping factor and was incorrectly assumed to be a looping factor due to a non-specific ZNF143 antibody that cross-reacts with CTCF. Congratulations to Domenic!
We are fortunate to receive one of the 7 NIH Director's Transformative Research Awards awarded across the US in 2024 for High Risk High Reward research for "transformative projects that are inherently risky and untested but have the potential to create or overturn fundamental paradigms".
This award will support the lab until 2029. Thank you NIH. 
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Hansen Lab at MIT, Building 56, Room 722, 32 Vassar St, Cambridge, MA 02139; Accessibility