Epigenetics Podcast

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Margaret (“Peggy”) Goodell from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas to talk about her work on the epigenetic regulation of stem cell self-renewal and differentiation. Dr. Margret Goodell's laboratory focuses on how differentiation and self-renewal is regulated in hematopoietic stem cells (HSC). In the early stages of her research career, however, Dr. Goodell was able to develop a new method to purify stem cells. This...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Keji Zhao from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, to talk about his work on the genome-wide investigation of epigenetic marks and nucleosome positioning. Dr. Keji Zhao pioneered in the development of cutting-edge techniques in the field of epigenetics. Current methods at that time relied on DNA microarrays, however, Dr. Zhao wanted a more comprehensive and...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Sarah Diermeier from the University of Otago in New Zealand to talk about her work on the role of long non-coding RNAs in tumor growth and treatment. Although only 1-2% of the human genome is transcribed into mRNAs that code for proteins, 75% of the genome is transcribed into non-coding RNAs. The function of these non-coding RNAs lie in the regulation of cellular processes and hence, offer the possibility of therapeutic...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Job Dekker from the University of Massachusetts Medical School to talk about his work on unraveling mechanisms of chromosome formation. In 2002, during graduate school, Job Dekker was the first author on the paper describing the chromosome conformation capture (3C) method, which revolutionized the field of nuclear architecture. In the 3C protocol, chromatin is crosslinked using formaldehyde and then digested using a restriction...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Danny Reinberg from the New York University School of Medicine to talk about his work on transcription and polycomb in inheritance and disease. Dr. Danny Reinberg is a pioneer in the characterization of transcription factors for human RNA polymerase II. In his groundbreaking work in the 1990s, he purified the essential transcription factors and reconstituted the polymerase in vitro on both naked DNA and chromatin. Dr....

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Sandra Atlante and Dr. Carlo Gaetano from the Instituti Clinici Scientifici Maugeri in Pavia, Italy, to talk about the roles epigenetic mechanisms play in COVID-19. In early 2020 a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, emerged in Wuhan, China. This coronavirus causes the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and rapidly spread all over the globe. In a worldwide effort, scientists and doctors tried to find drugs and looked for vaccines...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Wolf Reik, Director at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK, to talk about his work on the role of epigenetic factors in cellular reprogramming. In the beginning of his research career, Dr. Wolf Reik worked on cellular reprogramming during embryogenesis. Epigenetic marks like DNA methylation or post-translational modifications of histone tails are removed and reprogrammed during embryogenesis, which can limit the amount of...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Srinivas Ramachandran, Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus, to talk about his work on ​in vivo nucleosome structure and dynamics. Dr. Srinivas Ramachandran studies the structure and dynamics of nucleosomes during cellular processes like transcription and DNA replication. During transcription, as the RNA polymerase transcribes along the DNA, it needs to pass nucleosomes. Dr. Ramachandran...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Ken Zaret, Professor in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, to talk about his work on pioneer transcription factors and their influence on chromatin structure. Embryonic development is a complex process that needs to be tightly regulated. Multiple regulatory factors contribute to proper development, including a family of specialized regulatory...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Oded Rechavi, Professor at the University of Tel Aviv, to talk about his work on the role of small RNAs in transgenerational inheritance in C. elegans. The most prominent example of transgenerational inheritance is the Dutch famine of 1944 during World War II. Effects of this famine could be observed in the grandchildren of people that lived through this hunger winter, but the molecular mechanisms involved remain largely...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Hodaka Fujii, Professor of Biochemistry and Genome Biology at Hirosaki University Graduate School of Medicine and School of Medicine, to talk about his work on the development of locus-specific ChIP technologies. The goal of conventional chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays is to find genomic locations of transcription factor binding or genome-wide profiles of histone tail modifications. In contrast to that, the guest...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Geneviève Almouzni, Ph.D., Research Director at the CNRS at Institut Curie in Paris, to talk about her work on the regulation of chromatin organization by histone chaperones. Geneviève Almouzni got her Ph.D. from Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie in 1988 under the supervision of Marcel Méchali. She then moved to the United States to work as a postdoc in the National Institutes of Health in the laboratory of Professor Alan Wolffe....

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Christine Cucinotta and Dr. Melvin Noe Gonzalez to talk about how they brought the #fragilenucleosome seminar series and Discord channel to life. Christine Cucinotta and Melvin Noe Gonzales are part of the organizing committee of the independent scientific community "Fragile Nucleosome." This community consists of a Discord channel with more than 1,000 members, a biweekly seminar series, a mentoring program, and a journal...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Professor Isabelle Mansuy, Ph.D., from the University of Zürich and the ETH Zürich, to talk about her work on epigenetic influences on memory formation and inheritance. Dr. Mansuy received her Ph.D. from the Friedrich Miescher Institute, Basel, Switzerland in 1994. After doing a postdoc at the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the Columbia University in New York, she moved to Zürich...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Chuan He, John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor at University of Chicago, to talk about his work on the influence of dynamic RNA methylation on gene expression. RNA methylation is an important biological process, and cellular RNA methylation levels can have profound impacts on normal cellular differentiation and cancer cell proliferation. Dr. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 2000 and went on to do his postdoctoral...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Michelle Trenkmann, Senior Editor at Nature. We discussed her work as an editor at Nature and how she contributed to the ENCODE 3 publications, which are the results of the third phase of the ENCODE project. Dr. Trenkmann also talked about how to get your research published in Nature and what it’s like to review high profile scientific articles. ENCODE References Immersive ENCODE WebsitePerspectives on...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Professor Bill Earnshaw, Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, to talk about his work on the role of non-histone proteins in chromosome structure and function during mitosis. In the beginning of Bill Earnshaw's research career little was known about the structure that holds the two individual sister chromatids together. This led to Bill pioneering in the use of autoantibodies for the...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Dirk Schübeler, Director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) in Basel, Switzerland, to talk about his work on the effects of DNA methylation on chromatin structure and transcription. Dirk Schübeler was born in Germany and started his scientific career in Braunschweig, Germany. After his postdoc at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, he joined the FMI in 2003 and never left. He was recently appointed...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Sir Adrian Bird, Buchanan Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh to talk about his work on CpG islands, DNA methylation, and the role of DNA methylation in human diseases. Adrian Bird has been a pioneer in studying the CpG dinucleotide sequence. The CpG dinucleotide is distributed genome-wide and has several properties expected of a genomic signaling module. The influence of CpG signaling on prozesses like...

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Leonid Mirny, Ph.D., from MIT to talk about his work on biophysical modeling of the 3-D structure of chromatin. Leonid Mirny was part of the initial Hi-C paper titled "Comprehensive Mapping of Long-Range Interactions Reveals Folding Principles of the Human Genome" that was published in 2009 in the journal Science. Since then, technology has evolved and Dr. Mirny's group has developed a method called Micro-C that improves the Hi-C...