The discovery of the first kinetochore proteins (CENP-A, CENP-B, CENP-C) was reported by Bill Earnshaw and Naomi Rothfield in 1985 in Chromosoma. Forty years later, Chromosoma/Chromosome Research has published a special issue (most articles are open access) link.springer.com/collections/...

Exciting new paper out! @allanaschooley.bsky.social and Sergey Venev led this project that let to the discovery of two chromosome folding programs: one inherited via mitotic chromosomes and one mitotic inherited through the cytoplasm! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share our latest fully in-house paper! 🎉 We show how cohesin integrates loop extrusion with sister tethering to guide the homology search during DNA repair. Huge congratulations to all authors, and to @fedeteloni.bsky.social for leading this work 👏 We’re excited to see his next steps!

Aujourd'hui c'est le solstice d'hiver dans l'hémisphère Nord. Les journées vont commencer à rallonger! Le soleil ne se lève à l'Est (centre de l'image avec Nord à gauche, Sud a droite) que lors des équinoxes. La position du lever change un peu tous les jours! (©Z. Al-Abbadi)

"We find that while TAD boundaries pair more frequently than non-boundary regions, these interactions are infrequent and are uncorrelated with transcriptional activity of genes within the TAD. (...) These results suggest that TAD boundary architecture and gene activity are largely uncoupled"

Can one map the genome-wide binding (1) and its protein partners (2) simultaneously from the same sample? Yes, one can. with CUT&ID ✂️🪪 Spearheaded — singlehandedly — by @annanordin.bsky.social No need of transgenesis, cloning and overexpression. Check it out, it's fast and its works.

It's gift-giving season and here's an idea: www.allourkitchens.com

So love wobbegongs. Everything is good about the wobbegong. Its name. Its flattened Oscar the Grouch face. Its frondy bits. Its lazy life as a hungry rug. And it’s a shark. Outstanding animal 10/10

A single line poem

Looking Forward to trying this with a bunch of 14 year-olds next time I teach static electricity.

Despite their best efforts, life is good.

"Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea" -- @davelevitan.bsky.social

this is mesmerizing

Today is the International day for the elimination of violence against women. In 2024, an estimated 50,000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members worldwide. That is 137 women and girls every day. One every ten minutes. www.un.org/en/observanc...

A new and fascinating story from @bencarty.bsky.social and the group, with crucial help from the teams of @naltemose.bsky.social, Simona Giunta, and @dfachinetti.bsky.social. Many thanks to all for a fantastic collaboration. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our new paper was just out. CRISPR screening with a CENP-C mutant reveals that KIF18A and CENP-E are coordinately involved in chromosome congression. We also find that cancer cells with low levels of CENP-E are sensitive for KIF18A inhibition. Congrats Jiahang Miao! www.cell.com/cell-reports...

🧬 Interested in dissecting dose-dependent transcriptional regulation through epigenome editing and synthetic biology for your PhD? Apply by 07.01.2026 to join the lab of @eddaschulz.bsky.social @molgen.mpg.de & #IMPRS-BAC #gradschool. 👉 www.molgen.mpg.de/5099133/schu...

Special issue: The discovery of CENP-A, the centromere-specific histone H3 variant turns 40 years! Sam Corless @scorless.bsky.social and Goks Thangaval @gokilavani.bsky.social are Revisiting the question: When is a centromere not a kinetochore? Check it out. rdcu.be/eMJkd

Left work and 30 sec later it came down hard…but got to see a nice rainbow. Karlsruhe Schlosspark.

Next Tuesday Oct 28, great talks of invited and local speakers of our Synthetic Genomics Center, in Heidelberg and on Zoom!

As promised, a recent painting! “Roja” Oils 16x9 You can still view this one in person (always looks so much better in person!) at @spoke-art.com NY! spoke-art.com/blogs/news/1...

New Tuesday (Oct 28) in Heidelberg and online: kick off event of the Center for Synthetic Genomics: program and link to zoom: www.syn-gen.de/kick-off

My entry for today’s #FluorescenceFriday: a pupal #Drosophila testis with muscles expressing 🔵 lifeact & 🔴 RFP-nls Honored & grateful to receive an honorable mention at @healthcare.nikon.com Nikon Small World 🌍🔬✨ 🔗 www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/20... #NikonSmallWorld #Microscopy #ScienceArt

Come join us in Geneva for everything epigenetics and gene regulation. It will be a great meeting! Please repost! www.keystonesymposia.org/conferences/...

This is 'Rakotzbrücke Devil’s Bridge', commissioned in 1860 in the German village of Kromlau in Gablenz on the estate of Friedrich Herrmann Rötschke, now a public park. Its purpose is ornamental: to form a perfect circle with its own reflection when light & wind permit. (📷: Dirk Förster, Flickr)

An Interview with Azim Surani Ashley Moffett and @geraldinejowett.bsky.social spoke to Azim, recipient of both the 2025 Kyoto Prize and 2026 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, about his non-traditional and inspirational route into academia: journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

A gallery of fireflies.

Last week we were in the Washington Post for our characterization of Robertsonian chromosomes. This week we are entering our 10th day of being shut down and all of our research is on hold. To help me feel not-so-bad, here is a thread of some studies we released right before the shutdown 🧵 [1/n]...

🚂 The T2T train keeps rolling: "The formation and propagation of human Robertsonian chromosomes" with Gerton and Garrison labs is out! What's a Robertsonian chromosome? Let Jen tell you herself in this great video, or read our paper: [1/3] 📺 youtu.be/JmlY5omxQVc 📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It is with great sadness that the University shares the news of the death of Professor Sir John Gurdon, founder of the @gurdoninstitute.bsky.social Read our tribute to the visionary Nobel Laureate and watch an interview from 2012, just after he won: https://bit.ly/4mM8o3r

Thanks to @erhardtlab.bsky.social for the news and views on our paper on DNA methylation&centromere www.nature.com/articles/s41....

I am leaving Rochester NY after attending the retirement fest of four giants in the field of evolutionary biology including my PhD advisor. This visit gave me a chance to revisit old haunts and reflect on my own somewhat unlikely origin story. 1/n

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“It actually doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.” ― Jane Goodall 💙 RIP to a real one. My childhood hero

🧬🌉Online @science.org Megabase-scale human #genome rearrangement with programmable bridge recombinases | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Become my colleague @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social ! 2 Associate Professorships in the areas of - prokaryotic/eukaryotic microbiology - metabolism my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Embryonic signatures of intergenerational epigenetic inheritance across paternal environment & genetic background @jamiehackett.bsky.social et al @embl.org see transcriptome changes in offspring after fertilisation by fathers exposed to gut dysbiosis or western diet www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

War ravaged Portland

Wut

#Jobalert 🚨: Please RT ! Looking for a #PhD student for exciting project on the interphase between epigenetics and cellular metabolism: How do (nuclear) metabolic enzymes reguate chromatin function ? #epigenomics, #epigenetics, #metabolism www.helmholtz-munich.de/en/ife/job-o...

Morning walk

Amazing 2. day at the GfG ‘Epigenetics & Chromatin’ symposium. Fantastic flash talks, a great first poster session and many memorable talks: among others @erhardtlab.bsky.social, @rodvilla.bsky.social, @thebraunlab.bsky.social, @flurylab.bsky.social, Ehrenhofer-Murray, Liefke, Heun, Imhof & Brehm.

Some (+)ve news to lighten another heavy weekend: our latest preprint (c/o Mattiroli + Ramani labs) is up! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A tour-de-force by 1st authors Bruna Eckhardt & @palindromephd.bsky.social, focusing on chromatin replication. RTs welcome; tweetorial in 3,2...(1/n)

Congratulations Needhi 🍸

Congrats to my friends in the Boettiger lab for this really beautiful live imaging work. A big leap forward in understanding the dynamic side of genome organization. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

PIWI clade Argonautes are essential for transposon silencing. Without them, animals are sterile due to massive transposon activity. But how does piRNA-guided target interaction translate into silencing? PhD student Júlia Portell Montserrat has an intriguing answer www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

My favorite experiment: targeted mutations in Piwi in flies that prevent it from binding Gtsf1/Asterix generate a Piwi protein that is loaded with piRNAs, translocates into the nucleus, but is unable to silence transposons, causing full sterility. A mutation we have been dreaming of for years.

🧬DZIF researchers have discovered that #HIV does not randomly integrate into the genome: the virus follows R-loops as signposts, with the enzyme Aquarius enabling the process. These findings open new avenues for potentially curative treatments. @marinalusic.bsky.social @natmicrobiol.nature.com

The BUB1 and BUBR1 paralogs scaffold the kinetochore fibrous corona | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Congratulations @vcmentowski.bsky.social for solving a remarkably challenging molecular puzzle