Epigenetics Podcast

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with John Rinn from the University of Colorado in Boulder to talk about his work on the role of lncRNAs in gene expression and nuclear organization. The Rinn Lab pioneered the approach of screening the human genome for long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs). More recently, the lab has shifted focus from measuring the number of lncRNAs to finding lncR...

 In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Morgan Levine from Altos lab to talk about her work on Epigenetic Clocks and Biomarkers of Ageing. The Levine Lab focuses on deciphering mechanisms that lead to epigenetic ageing, which can be measured by epigenetic clocks. Epigenetic clocks were first described in 2011 by Bocklandt et al.. Later-on, the Horvath and the Hannum clock we...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Jan Żylicz from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine to talk about his work on epigenetic and metabolic regulation of early development. The focus of the Żylicz Lab is studying early development and how this process is influenced by epigenetic factors. In more detail, the Team focuses on the function of chromatin mo...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Active Motif scientists Casidee McDonough from Epigenetic Services and Kyle Tanguay from R&D to talk about technical details of the CUT&Tag protocol and current developments around this method in our R&D Team.  CUT&Tag, which is short for Cleavage Under Targets and Tagmentation, is a molecular biology method that is used to investigate...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Ian Maze from Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator to talk about his work on the role of histone dopaminylation and serotinylation in neuronal plasticity. The Maze group focuses on understanding the complex interplay between chromatin regulatory mechanisms in brain and neurona...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Erna Magnúsdóttir from the University of Iceland to talk about her work on the role of Blimp-1 in immune-cell differentiation. The Magnúsdóttir Lab is interested in how the mammalian genome is interpreted in a context dependent manner, leading to different cellular states, by using mouse primordial germ cells as well as mouse and human...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we speak with Peter Smibert, Vice President of Biology at 10X Genomics to talk about an exciting new method in Multimodal Characterization of Cellular Identity using Barcoding. During his time at the New York Genome Center, Peter Smibert was instrumental in the development of a new method called "Cellular Indexing of Transcriptomes and Epitopes by Sequen...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Sara Wickström, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster, to talk about her work on the effect of mechanotransduction on chromatin structure and transcription in stem cells. Sara Wickström and her team focus on the stem cell niche and how that niche affects stem cell function. In order to study the nativ...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Ben Hindson, Chief Scientific Officer at 10X Genomics, to talk about single-cell technologies using microfluidics. Epigenetics has moved well past a simple understanding of a single epigenetic layer of control at genomic regions of interest, thanks to advances in many techniques and the application of “multiomics”. We can now analyze ge...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Eleni Tomazou from St. Anna Children's Cancer Research Institute in Vienna to talk about her work on Epigenome-based precision medicine. The Tomazou lab studies Ewing sarcoma and the effects of Epigenetic factors on this disease. Ewing sarcoma is a type of cancer that affects bone and soft tissue of children and young adults, with a pea...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Manel Esteller, Director of the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute to talk about his work on Epigenetics and Epitranscriptomics in Cancer. The focus of Manel Esteller's research career and the focus of his current team is to characterize the epigenome and epitranscriptome of cancer cells in comparison to healthy cells, and their...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Yad Ghavi-Helm from the Institut de Génomique Functionnelle de Lyon to talk about her work on enhancer-promoter interactions during development. The Laboratory of Yad Ghavi-Helm focuses on how developmental genes are regulated by enhancers. Their work shows that developmental genes are often regulated by more than one enhancer and that...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Folami Ideraabdullah from the University of Chapel Hill to talk about her work on the environmental modulation of the epigenome during development. The lab of Folami Ideraabdullah focuses on studying how environmental factors modulate the epigenome. In particular the team investigates how Vitamin D levels influence epigenetic processes...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Jane Mellor from the University of Oxford to talk about her work on H3K4me3, SET proteins, Isw1 and their role in transcription. Since the beginning of the century, Jane Mellor and her team have focused on H3K4 trimethylation and the factors that influence this mark. They discovered that H3K4me3 is an almost universal mark of the first...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Katja Kobow from the Universitätsklinikum Erlangen to talk about her work on the role of DNA methylation in Epilepsy. Katja Kobow started studying the role of Epigenetics in Epilepsy by doing a genome wide Bisulfite-Sequencing screen that revealed a typical DNA methylation signature of epileptic patients versus healthy controls. After t...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Emily Bernstein from Icahn Schoon of Medicine at Mount Sinai to talk about her work on MacroH2A function and the role of Polycomb proteins in its epigenetic regulation, and how this affects in stem cell development and disease. The Bernstein Lab focuses on histone variants, in particular the H2A variant macroH2A. Chromatin architecture...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Jane Skok from New York University School of Medicine to talk about her work on spatio-temporal alterations in chromosome dynamics. Studies demonstrating that nuclear organization and long-range chromatin interactions play essential roles in gene regulation have been the focus of the Skok Lab, where the team has played a leading role. T...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Marieke Oudelaar from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry to talk about her work on chromatin organization during development and disease. Marieke Oudelaar and her team focus on on developing high-resolution Chromosome Conformation Capture (3C) based techniques, like low-input Capture-C, Tri-C, and Tiled-C. Those techniqu...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Camila dos Santos from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories to talk about her work on enhancers and chromatin remodeling in mammary gland development. The lab of Camila dos Santos focuses on epigenetic regulation of normal and malignant mammary gland development. After puberty, the next significant phase in mammary gland development occurs i...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Marnie Blewitt from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research to talk about her work on the role of SMCHD1 in Development and Disease. The Laboratory of Marnie Blewitt focuses finding inhibitors or activators for the epigenetic regulator SMCHD1. Marnie Blewitt identified and characterized this protein during her PhD and th...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Efrat Shema from the Weizmann Institute of Science to talk about her work on Single Molecule Imaging of chromatin, and the analysis of nucleosomes circulating in plasma. In ChIP-Seq experiments the peak you get as a read out represents an average over, most often, millions of cells. Furthermore, one often does not know if that peak repr...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Serena Sanulli from Stanford University to talk about her work on Heterochromatin Protein 1 (HP1), the structure of chromatin on the atomic-scale and the meso-scale, and phase separation. The Laboratory of Serena Sanulli is interested in finding connections between changes that happen on the nucleosomal level and the resulting impact on...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Catherine Jensen Peña from Princeton University to talk about her work on early life stress and its effects on behavior. The Laboratory of Catherine Peña focuses on how early life experiences are encoded and maintained into adulthood, with a long-lasting impact on behavior. Recent work showed, that child maltreatment and other forms of...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Ali Shilatifard from Northwestern University to talk about his work on targeting COMPASS to cure childhood leukemia. The Shilatifard Lab studies childhood leukemia and how it can potentially be treated using epigenetic targets. The team focuses on is SET1/COMPASS, a histone H3 lysine4 methylase. Ali Shilatifard was able to purify and id...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Yael David from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York to talk about her work on Effects of Non-Enzymatic Covalent Histone Modifications on Chromatin.  The David lab studies on non-enzymatic covalent modifications of Histones, including Histone glycation and citrullination. These modifications recognize metabolites that are...