Laboratory of Chromatin Biology @ UTSA NDRB
Where to begin...
So much happened in the last month - it's getting hard to keep up with the news:
Cameron made her decisions and is joining The David Rockefeller Graduate Program in Bioscience - the only candidate coming from the state of Texas. The Rockefeller University is a special place, and we are incredibly proud and a little bit jealous. "Good show" indeed.
Ben Nacev's paper on unusual histone mutations in cancer was published this week in Nature Communications - congrats to all!
Lab has grown, and so has our website! We are still working some kinks out though...
With a bang
A week after graduation, Amina received an annual departmental award for her research. Also shown here is a cool beetle she elected to receive in liew of monetary prize we found outside the lab. Congratulations!
'Tis the season!
Amina graduated (with all sorts of honors) today, and we had a blast cheering for her. Alexey got to wear his Hogwarts garb, too. We are not saying good-byes though - she is staying around for some more science!
We are also excited to welcome the new generation - Natalie Redding and Ksenia Dydo are new undergraduate assistants, Gauri Raje is joining for the final year of her Masters project, and Tiffany Bastos is a new research assistant in the lab. Time for a new lab photo!
ASBMB highlights:
This year's DiscoverBMB meeting was in San Antonio, so we all got to spend a few days learning about great science and making new friends (and talking about our own work!). Cherry on top, ASBMB noticed and wrote a neat highlight about our ongoing projects.
Update: abstracts by Amina, Dustin, and Cameron are now published as a supplement to JBC!
Good news from CPRIT!
Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas just announced the 2024 Individual Investigator awards, and our application was selected for funding! (UPD: it was the top-scoring grant of all applications they received this cycle...). Over the next three years, we will decipher the genetic dependencies, consequences, and vulnerabilities of H1 loss in B-cell maligancy, and attempt to "rescue" the defect with orthogonal approaches - stay tuned for more.
Update: we have made it to UTSA Today, Paisano (with funny typos), and even departmental insta! Smash that like button and subscribe!
Cam wins best poster award at PSU Summer Symposium!
Cameron presented a developing story on the role of Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 in embryonic stem cells - a tour-de-force project encompassing gene editing, imaging, ChIP- and RNA-Seq, all together suggetsing that both loss and gain of PRC2-dependent histone H3 lysine 27 methylation drives functionally similar transcriptional and developmental outcomes. This is the first trainee award in our lab - congratulations!
We got a grant:
Our pilot project to develop in vivo single-molecule imaging platform for wild type and mutant linker histones is now funded through American Cancer Society and Mays Cancer Center at UT Health! Stay tuned for more to come!
We are growing!
Dustin Fetch and Amina Jumamyradova have joined the lab!
New Paper:
"A de novo sequence variant in Barrier-to-Autointegration Factor Is associated with dominant motor neuronopathy" - Last month, we helped the Geyer and Zinn-Justin labs run a few Western blots to document histone modification changes associated with a unique point mutation in Barrier-to-Autoinregration Factor (BAF) protein. The story is now available online! Congratulations to all who contributed to this collaboration!
New Paper:
"Dual role of lipids for genome stability and pluripotency facilitates full potency of mouse embryonic stem cells" - What started as a number of puzzling observations about how lipid supplements affect pluripotency circuit in culture, is now hot off the press at Protein & Cell - highlighting how deeply metabolic regulation is connected to genome integrity, epigenetic mechanisms, and whole organism development. Congratulations to all authors, and special kudos to Liangwen and Duancheng!
in memoriam
"Every amino acid matters, but people matter more" - the work of C. David Allis rewrote the textbook on how gene expression is regulated, but to everyone lucky to have known him personally, his impact extended far beyond fundamental discoveries. Dave's optimism and infectious excitement for science paired uniquely with a humble and gentle personality. Seemingly random souvenirs and photos of family and lab members past and present (the "lab family" term was used often) covered his office floor to ceiling, and brought more joy to him than his (well deserved) Nike of Samothrace. Colors of chromatin shine less brightly today, but his legacy will live on.
Feb 16 addendum - obituaries now published by Nature, Science and Cell offer a glimpse into how Dave's lab transformed the field.
New Lab Member:
Cameron joins the lab! It takes special courage to be the first employee - when scientific challenges are overshadowed by organizational ones. Welcome!
New Paper:
A fantastic story by Yadira Soto-Feliciano, Francisco Sanchez-Rivera, and many great collaborators in the Allis, Lowe and Armstrong labs is finally out in Cancer Discovery! One step closer to understanding the (non)redundancies of Mixed Lineage Leukemia methyltransferases, and how they can be leveraged in practical therapies for AML. Congratulations to Yadira and all!