Transcriptional regulation in response to external stimuli

One of the key mechanisms by which cells respond to stimuli is transcriptional activation and/or repression. These transcriptional changes are tightly regulated by various molecular mechanisms. We aim to understand the regulatory roles of the 3D genome organization as well as changes in chromatin accessibility and their interconnections. We study the response to activation of the Glucocorticoid Receptor (GR) which has a role in a wide range of physiological processes, in mouse cell lines and human primary immune cells. We focus on changes in the local genomic landscape.

 

 

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Nuclear architecture during differentiation

Differentiation is a complicated cellular process at the end of which a multi-potent cell becomes a specialized cell. This process is accompanied by global changes in the organization of the genome in the nuclear space. We use well characterized differentiation systems to follow these changes in high temporal resolution along the differentiation process and decipher the molecular mechanisms that guide these changes.

 

 

 

Transcriptional regulation in plants

How cells acquire and maintain their identity is particularly fascinating in plants which have the ability to maintain certain level of plasticity demonstrated by their capacity to de-differentiate throughout the plant’s life cycle. Despite the ever growing wealth of data about gene expression networks, understanding how transcription programs are regulated and how cells are defined within the whole plant remains a mystery at large. We aim to decode the regulation of transcription programs of specialized plant cells by three interconnected layers: (i) network of transcription factors (TFs), (ii) selective chromatin accessibility at regulatory loci, and (iii) chromosomal associations of genes with their regulatory loci, which may lie at large distances along the chromosome.