- Leo and Ashley presented our joint project with the Wanat lab at the 2025 SfN meeting in San Diego.
- Ksenia presented at the 2025 Bringing Chemistry to Medicine Symposium at St Jude.
- Alexey traveled to St. Louis to New Investigators in Chromatin meeting.
Changes to Research section are long overdue - stay tuned for the update!
Lots of new developments in the lab this Summer:
- Gauri is starting her PhD at UT Southwestern's Basic Biomedical Sciences Program - "good show!" and not a good-bye - we'll keep in touch (and the polyamine story is still work-in-progress we are very excited to see to completion in the coming months)
- Wan Song joined the lab as postdoctoral associate, Ashley Miller as a graduate student (via Neuroscience PhD program), and Marzieh Rouzbehani as a student volunteer - welcome aboard! (update to "People" section is pending...)
- Ashley attended a workshop on Molecular Biology hosted by New England Biolabs at Smith College, MA, and Dustin traveled to Italy to learn much-needed bioinformatic skills at Bologna Summer School of Genome Regulation (with a mandatory detour to Rome, of course).
- Dustin, Amina and Cameron lead the effort on a massive review entitled "Aere perennius: how chromatin fidelity is maintained and lost in disease" - now published in NAR Molecular Medicine. We learned a lot writing it!
- Same crew characterized a massive RNA-Seq dataset I generated a few years ago: how do genes change expression when mouse embryonic stem cells are subjected to 2i conversion, and what role does Polycomb play in it? Now published in Data in Brief!
Information encoded in chromatin is preserved over many rounds of cell divisions, through developmental transitions and environmental inputs - allowing for non-sequuence-dependent ("epigenetic") encoding. How fidelity of epigenetic regulation is maintained has beed subject of some fascinating recent studies, and in our new review we explore both the normal mechanisms, and their dysfunction in disease.
"aere perennius" is a line from Horace's Exegi monumentum: meaning "stronger than bronze", it is a not-so-subtle nod to an idea that memory lasts longer than physical items. We think that chromatin is a perfect example of that!
- Juvenile hormone degradation manuscript from the Barton Lab is on BioRxiv - we are not a "fly lab" but are big fans of collaboration and shared expertise, and Amina put together a critical figure to link developmental phenotypes to transcriptional misregulation.
- Gauri's ASBMB abstract is now published in JBC Supplement! Some new data suggest the story is even more complex, so stay tuned...
- Leo and Ashley won a poster award at the NDRB retreat! - "good show!"
Last month we celebrated Gauri's MS defense and acceptance into Basic Biomedical Sciences Program at UT Southwestern - "good show!" (c). An ASBMB meeting in Chicago is a cherry on top!
We had a busy few months, but we are back with updates and news:
- Brigid, Leo, Ava and Noah have joined the lab: meet the team in People.
- Agata's paper is out on bioRxiv, and Yong's paper is out in Mucosal Immunology.
- Dustin presented the coolest story at NIH (and we have a photo to prove it).
- Alexey now has two cats, because another orange cat needed a home.
- Gauri will present at ASBMB, Natalie at NCUR, and Dustin is traveling to Waco next week to present at TAS meeting.
When I started this lab and first cohort of rotation students came in, we jotted down several fairly random ideas for them to pick and choose from. Krystal Goyins - now in the Barton lab - developed a biotin-ligase tagged transcription factor panel, to label nucleosome adjacent to the occupied TF binding site. The idea is that degenerate sequences recognized by your typical TFs are orders of magnitude more abundant in the genome than actually occupied sites, and histone modifications play a role - and proximity labeling in vivo can help us pull them out of the "background". Using Krystal's system, and with our amazing collaborator Dr. Mingjiang Xu at UT Health San Antonio, we will test whether this is the case - now with CPRIT High Impact High Risk award!
UPD: now featured in UTSA CoS news!
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...
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!
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!
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!
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!
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!
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!
Dustin Fetch and Amina Jumamyradova have joined the lab!
"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!
"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!
"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.
Cameron joins the lab! It takes special courage to be the first employee - when scientific challenges are overshadowed by organizational ones. Welcome!
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!
