Epigenetics Podcast

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Srinivas Ramachandran, Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus, to talk about his work on ​in vivo nucleosome structure and dynamics. Dr. Srinivas Ramachandran studies the structure and dynamics of nucleosomes during cellular processes like transcription and DNA replication. During transcription, a...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Ken Zaret, Professor in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, to talk about his work on pioneer transcription factors and their influence on chromatin structure. Embryonic development is a complex process that needs to be tightly regulated. Multiple regulator...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Oded Rechavi, Professor at the University of Tel Aviv, to talk about his work on the role of small RNAs in transgenerational inheritance in C. elegans. The most prominent example of transgenerational inheritance is the Dutch famine of 1944 during World War II. Effects of this famine could be observed in the grandchildren of people t...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Hodaka Fujii, Professor of Biochemistry and Genome Biology at Hirosaki University Graduate School of Medicine and School of Medicine, to talk about his work on the development of locus-specific ChIP technologies. The goal of conventional chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays is to find genomic locations of transcription factor...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Geneviève Almouzni, Ph. D., Research Director at the CNRS at Institut Curie in Paris, to talk about her work on the regulation of chromatin organization by histone chaperones. Geneviève Almouzni got her Ph. D. from Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie in 1988 under the supervision of Marcel Méchali. She then moved to the United States to wo...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Christine Cucinotta and Dr. Melvin Noe Gonzalez to talk about how they brought the #fragilenucleosome seminar series and Discord channel to life.   Christine Cucinotta and Melvin Noe Gonzales are part of the organizing committee of the independent scientific community "Fragile Nucleosome." This community consists of a Discord channe...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Professor Isabelle Mansuy, Ph. D., from the University of Zürich and the ETH Zürich, to talk about her work on epigenetic influences on memory formation and inheritance.   Dr. Mansuy received her Ph. D. from the Friedrich Miescher Institute, Basel, Switzerland in 1994. After doing a postdoc at the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Chuan He, John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor at University of Chicago, to talk about his work on the influence of dynamic RNA methylation on gene expression. RNA methylation is an important biological process, and cellular RNA methylation levels can have profound impacts on normal cellular differentiation and cancer cell...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Michelle Trenkmann, Senior Editor at Nature. We discussed her work as an editor at Nature and how she contributed to the ENCODE 3 publications, which are the results of the third phase of the ENCODE project. Dr. Trenkmann also talked about how to get your research published in Nature and what it’s like to review high profile scienti...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Professor Bill Earnshaw, Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, to talk about his work on the role of non-histone proteins in chromosome structure and function during mitosis.   In the beginning of Bill Earnshaw's research career little was known about the structure that holds the two individual sister...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Dirk Schübeler, Director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) in Basel, Switzerland, to talk about his work on the effects of DNA methylation on chromatin structure and transcription.   Dirk Schübeler was born in Germany and started his scientific career in Braunschweig, Germany. After his postdoc at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Sir Adrian Bird, Buchanan Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh to talk about his work on CpG islands, DNA methylation, and the role of DNA methylation in human diseases.   Adrian Bird has been a pioneer in studying the CpG dinucleotide sequence. The CpG dinucleotide is distributed genome-wide and has several properties e...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Leonid Mirny, Ph. D., from MIT to talk about his work on biophysical modeling of the 3-D structure of chromatin. Leonid Mirny was part of the initial Hi-C paper titled "Comprehensive Mapping of Long-Range Interactions Reveals Folding Principles of the Human Genome" that was published in 2009 in the journal Science. Since then, technolog...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Karolin Luger, Ph. D., from the University of Colorado in Boulder to talk about her work on solving the crystal structure of the nucleosome and on how histone chaperones like FACT act on chromatin. During her postdoc with Timothy Richmond at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Karolin Luger was the first author on an al...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Bing Ren, Ph. D., from the University of California, San Diego and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research to talk about his work on identifying functional elements of the genome and higher order genome structure.   Dr. Ren’s lab invented an approach using chromatin immunoprecipitation-based methods for the identification of transcript...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Erez Lieberman Aiden, Ph. D. from Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University in Houston to talk about his work on developing Hi-C and investigating the three-dimensional structure of the genome. He was the first author on a publication in the journal Science titled "Comprehensive Mapping of Long-Range Interactions Reveals Folding Pr...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Professor Tom Moss from Université Laval in Québec City, Canada to talk about his work on the chromatin structure and dynamics at ribosomal RNA genes. Dr. Tom Moss has been a member of the Department of Molecular Biology, Medical Biochemistry, and Pathology at the Laval University School of Medicine since he was recruited from the Unive...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Andrew Pospisilik from the Van Andel Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan to talk about his work on the epigenetic origins of heterogeneity and disease. Dr. Andrew Pospisilik worked at the Max-Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg for 8 years and in 2018 he joined the Van Andel Institute as the director of its...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Karol Bomsztyk M.D. and Tom Matula, Ph. D. from the University of Washington and Matchstick Technologies, to talk about their work on DNA and chromatin sonication. During his career, Karol's research has focused on improving ChIP protocols to make them faster, easier and higher throughput. First, to make ChIP assays faster, Karol and hi...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we sat down with Marcus Buschbeck, Group Leader at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, to talk about his work on the histone variant macroH2A, its role in metabolism and how it contributes to the regulation of chromatin structure.   Histone variants equip chromatin with unique properties and show a specific genomic distribution....

In this Episode we sat down with Shelley Berger, Keynote Speaker at the "EMBO | EMBL Symposium: Metabolism Meets Epigenetics" to talk about her work on Epigenetic Mechanisms of Aging and Longevity. On how cytoplasmic chromatin fragments are involved in these processes, how alcohol has an effect on Histone PTMs in the brain and last but not least how Ants became her favorite Model Organism. Referen...

In this Episode of the Epigenetics Podcast our guest Lucy Stead from the University of Leeds provides insight into her work on intratumor heterogeneity in Glioblastoma. In order to tackle this area she uses an holistic approach including Computational Genomics, In silico Modeling and Functional Genomics in order to test whether treatment-resistant subclones emerge in recurrent tumors, and characte...

Joe Fernandez, the founder of Active Motif, has played a significant role in the evolution of the biotechnology industry. He’s seen where the industry has been, and he has a good idea where it’s going.  Prior to founding Active Motif in 1999, Joe was a co-founder of Invitrogen where he helped revolutionize molecular cloning with the TOPO TA kit. Joe’s passion for disrupting established workflows b...

In this Episode of the Epigenetics Podcast our guest Ana Pombo from the Max-Delbrück-Center in Berlin provides insight in her work on the interplay between gene regulation and genome architecture. To do so she and her team use different state of the art methods, including cryo-sectioning to unravel this regulatory network. In 2006, they proposed the Interchromatin Network Model of chromosome organ...

Dosage compensation is an essential process to regulate the gene expression of the X-chromosome in female and male flies. Thereby the mechanism of regulation in humans and in drosophila is different. In humans one X-chromosome is randomly shut down in females compared to men, whereas in drosophila equilibrium is achieved by overexpression of the single X-chromosome in males. In this Episode our gu...