Shin et al 2026. CTCF demarcates H3K9me2 or H3K9me3 chromatin domains and restricts the spreading of these modifications faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... ▶️Related to our previous paper which showed that CTCF forms boundaries of H3K9me2/H3K9me3 nanodomains www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our paper on the newest version of the Registry of candidate cis-Regulatory Elements (cCREs) is out 🧬 Huge thanks to the many collaborators, experimentalists, analysts and software developers who made this work possible — truly a team effort! A "meme-torial" of the science is coming soon 👀

Structural organization and function of telomeric chromatin [Review by Ruben van der Lugt & Jacqueline Jacobs] www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The famous "It takes two to think" by @itaiyanai.bsky.social and martinlercher.bsky.social (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) may have some ramifications in the era of AI :)

We are looking for a Postdoc at the Center for Gene Expression in Copenhagen. Deadline for applications is the 11th of January. If you are interested in 3D chromatin, SMC complexes, and super-resolution microscopy, join us. www.nature.com/naturecareer...

As usual this time of year, started drafting the list of gene regulation conferences for 2026, enjoy! generegulation.org/conferences-... Know of a relevant event that’s missing? Please reply below

1/ 🎄 We got our Christmas present today: "Two distinct chromatin modules regulate proinflammatory gene expression" is now published @natcellbio.nature.com doi.org/10.1038/s415.... Our study introduces a scATAC-seq-based framework for genome-wide analysis of gene regulation features.

A major output of the 4D Nucleome project appeared today. This is the joint effort of many scientists working together and (publicly) sharing data and results for several years. We hope this is of interest to many genome biologists! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Confused by all the histones that are cropping up in organisms that are decidedly NOT eukaryotes? check out our review - fantastic work by team NucEvo in the #Lugerlab The Expanding Histone Universe: Histone-Based DNA Organization in Noneukaryotic Organisms - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Our Science paper is out! Huge congratulations to @huabin-zhou.bsky.social, Mike Rosen, and the brilliant @janhuemar.bsky.social @juliamaristany.bsky.social and @kieran-russell.bsky.social from our group News: bit.ly/4avnkAr and bit.ly/3XBGVHS Great perspective by @vram142.bsky.social +K Zhang

Rudnizky et al., 2025. Ultrafast CTCF dynamics control cohesin barrier function www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I'm guest-editing a collection on "Enhancer-promoter interactions" at Genome Biology. Please send us your exciting stories! link.springer.com/collections/...

Maansson et al., 2025. Liquid biopsy epigenetics: establishing a molecular profile based on cell-free DNA [review] febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Some refs on nucleosome-mediated cooperativity in TF binding: ▶️Concept suggested by Polach & Widom, 1996: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... ▶️Our first single-bp resolution model, 2010: www.cell.com/biophysj/ful... ▶️Its application to TFs at enhancers, 2011: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

We are pleased to announce a new preprint by @mlweilert.bsky.social: “Widespread low-affinity motifs enhance chromatin accessibility and regulatory potential in mESCs” (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...). See summary and longer recap below: (TLDR; low-affinity motifs matter as pioneers!)

Circular DNA has a ticket to ride chromosomes www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A new £2.5 million Government-funded laboratory is set to open at the University of Essex to train workplace-ready scientists for the NHS and the life-sciences sector www.essex.ac.uk/news/2025/11...

Congratulations to Amishasingh Beeharry for successfully passing the MSD viva! You are the best, Amisha! Thank you very much to the examiners, Abdenour Soufi and Toni Marco!

Finally, we propose a model in which chromatin is self-organising based on histone acetylation and nucleosome depletion. We hypothesise that active cis-regulatory elements may contact one another at or above a layer of acetylated nucleosomes.

Spread the word! There is a professor position opening at our University @upcite.bsky.social. There are several possible (great) labs to join, but if you are interested in DNA methylation and epigenetics in mammals, don't hesitate to contact me directly!

Since 2020, we were running a practical introducing year 2 students to a hypothetical situation requiring to diagnose a patient placed in ICU based on real-time analysis of cfDNA. This new paper shows that it works in actual ICU at a bedside-relevant sequencing depth www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Do we need LLMs to predict epigenomes from DNA—or is biophysics enough? 🧬 IceQream (IQ) is a biophysics-based framework that predicts epigenomes with SOTA-level accuracy—and is fully explainable. @NatureComms: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Thread 🧵👇 1/

Bercovich et al., 2025. IceQream: Quantitative chromosome accessibility analysis using physical TF models www.nature.com/articles/s41... ▶️spatially integrates sequences and localises them relative to the target locus ▶️infers effective TF concentrations ▶️supplements with pairwise TF interactions

We lack clear guidelines for AI use by our students. My attempt: Encouraged (when used responsibly): ✅Exploration, brainstorming and troubleshooting ✅Controlled software development and debugging Discouraged (in most cases): 🚫Writing or "improving" academic texts 🚫Creating academic illustrations

we are recruiting a postdoc with interest in using genomics and molecular biology to study transcription factors. We have an R35 to fund the project/salary.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT📣: I haven’t been this excited to be part of something new in 15 years… Thrilled to reveal the passion project I’ve been working on for the past year and a half!🙀🥳 (thread 👇)

Just received a notification that our university is renegotiating #openaccess agreements with the “big five” publishers (Springer, Elsevier, etc), and it is highly likely that we will lose some of these agreements. If we do, this will be a big problem since we do not have budgets to pay OA fees

Remember this paper "Low overlap of transcription factor DNA binding and regulatory targets" ? (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) well, well, well 🍿 ⬇️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Sequencing advice sought: Anyone have any experience of Element AVITI sequencing for methylation profiling by WGBS or EM-sequencing? Useful to know what other people's experience is as local facility have one and cheaper than Illumina for short read sequencing. Please share 🙏 #epigenetics

Now that I'm settled in at @umasschan.bsky.social, I'm hiring at all levels: grad students, post-docs, and software engineers/bioinformaticians! The goal of my lab is to understand the regulatory role of every nucleotide in our genomes and how this changes across every cell in our bodies.

Interesting paper from Gernot Längst & Co. They calculated nucleosome repeat length in Plasmodium falciparum, the malaria-causing parasite, and showed that it follows a smooth continuous function of time (the numbers on the X axis below are hours post-invasion) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Many enhancers that drive tissue-specific gene expression are already connected to gene promoters in human pluripotent cells. In a new preprint, we share some clues about when, how, and why this happens! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Polletti et al, 2025. Control of myeloid lineage fidelity and response to stimuli by ISWI-enforced nucleosome phasing www.cell.com/immunity/abs... ▶️PU.1 can form strongly phased nucleosome arrays similar to CTCF

📣 New preprint from the lab - Endogenous fluctuations of transcription factor levels shape their occupancy in unexpected ways www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We have space for two postdoctoral fellows in the Taipale Lab at the @sangerinstitute.bsky.social. This is a core-funded open position! Come with your ideas and interests and we can develop a project together. sanger.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Wellco...

Asking BlueSky for help: For a review, I am trying to accurately credit the first paper that measured pairwise 3D distances between 2 pieces of DNA on the same chromosome (or cosmid). Is Trask 1989 the first? I know of earlier single-locus papers (1982). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Some time ago I gave a lecture "How to become a genius: An interpretation/adaptation of Altshuller’s Theory of Solutions of Inventive Problems (TRIZ)". It included interactive part "life as a chess game", but static slides may be also of interest. Putting it online generegulation.org/teaching/Tei...

Aging by the clock and yet without a program [perspective by David Meyer, Alexei Maklakov & Björn Schumacher] www.nature.com/articles/s43...

We are hiring! We are looking for a PDRA to study the epigenetics of breast cancer dormancy using chemical biology and genomics approaches. This is a 3-year position and is aimed at chemical biologists or biologists. Please share and apply using the link below 👇👇👇 www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

Hsu et al., 2025. MNase stratification reveals heterogeneous 5hmC in naive B cells www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy to announce that our department (School of Life Sciences at the University of Essex) is now ranked 6th out of 91 UK universities in the subject area Biology according to the Guardian University Guide 2026. This is our increase from 7th in 2025 www.theguardian.com/education/ng...

A random bit of history (for modern analogies). Lysenko set back genetics in USSR by ~50 years. Hundreds of geneticists imprisoned or died. Cybernetics was also named "reactionary pseudoscience", and about to undergo similar fate, but got lucky that this started close to the end of the Stalin era.

Excited to share my postdoc work, out on bioRxiv today! Histones package DNA into nucleosomes to form the building blocks of chromatin, but how modular and programmable is this system? 1/9

Peer-reviewers spend so much time to help journals that it would be only fair if academic publishers in return approve the sending of the textbooks that we request as free "instructor copies". There should be an option to get them as a *printed copy*, not just digital 📖

When biology and medicine overlap in the same paper 🙂🙃 TF - "transcription factor" vs "tumor fraction". NRL (nucleosome repeat length) vs NLR (neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio). Reads very similar and both on-topic :)

We're super excited to announce the entire lineup for the Fall season of Fragile Nucleosome Seminars, starting on Sept 10th at 1200 EDT / 1600 UTC with @gracebower.bsky.social and @creminslab.bsky.social! register here for the entire series: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...