Publications related to Unraveling the KRAB/KAP1 control of transposable elements in pluripotent and somatic cells

Ancestral genome reconstruction enhances transposable element annotation by identifying degenerate integrants

Didier Trono, Evaristo Jose Planet Letschert, Wayo Matsushima

Growing evidence indicates that transposable elements (TEs) play important roles in evolution by providing genomes with coding and non-coding sequences. Identification of TE-derived functional elements, however, has relied on TE annotations in individual s ...

2024

Deciphering the nature of cell state transitions in single cells using quantitative modeling of temporal dynamics

Alex Russell Lederer

Cells are the smallest operational units of living systems. Through synthesis of various biomolecules and exchange of signals with the environment, cells tightly regulate their composition to realize a specific functional state. The transformation of a cel ...

EPFL2024

Single-cell epigenomic reconstruction of developmental trajectories from pluripotency in human neural organoid systems

Fides Zenk

Cell fate progression of pluripotent progenitors is strictly regulated, resulting in high human cell diversity. Epigenetic modifications also orchestrate cell fate restriction. Unveiling the epigenetic mechanisms underlying human cell diversity has been di ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Accessible and highly observable gastrointestinal organoid model systems for studying host-pathogen interactions

Moritz Hofer

Traditional cell cultures have long been fundamental to biological research, offering an alternative to animal models burdened by ethical constraints and procedural intricacies, often lacking relevance to human physiology and disease. Moreover, their inabi ...

EPFL2024

Meeting our Makers: Uncovering the cis-regulatory activity of transposable elements using statistical learning

Cyril David Son-Tuyên Pulver

The adaptation of organisms to their environment depends on the innovative potential inherent to genetic variation. In complex organisms such as mammals, processes like development and immunity require tight gene regulation. Complex forms emerge more often ...

EPFL2024

Bioengineering functional organoid models across scales

Tania Hübscher

The last two decades have seen the development of organoid models for many different tissues and organs. Organoids are three-dimensional organ-mimetics derived from stem or progenitor cells comprising various specialized cell types, resembling the architec ...

EPFL2024

Clinically compliant cryopreservation of differentiated retinal pigment epithelial cells

Cheng Zhao, Gioele La Manno, Alex Russell Lederer

Background aims: Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common cause of blindness in elderly patients within developed countries, affecting more than 190 million worldwide. In AMD, the retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cell layer progressively d ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2024

The dynamic genetic determinants of increased transcriptional divergence in spermatids

Christina Ernst

Cis-genetic effects are key determinants of transcriptional divergence in discrete tissues and cell types. However, how cis- and trans-effects act across continuous trajectories of cellular differentiation in vivo is poorly understood. Here, we quantify al ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Single-mitosis dissection of acute and chronic DNA mutagenesis and repair

Christina Ernst

How chronic mutational processes and punctuated bursts of DNA damage drive evolution of the cancer genome is poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate a strategy to disentangle and quantify distinct mechanisms underlying genome evolution in single cells, dur ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Genome sequences of Vibrio cholerae strains isolated in the DRC between 2009 and 2012

Melanie Blokesch, Sandrine Stutzmann, Natalia Carolina Drebes Dorr, Alexandre Lemopoulos

Vibrio cholerae has caused seven cholera pandemics in the past two centuries. The seventh and ongoing pandemic has been particularly severe on the African continent. Here, we report long read-based genome sequences of six V. cholerae strains isolated in th ...

2024

Characterization of the gut-bone marrow axis through bile acid signaling

Alejandro Alonso Calleja

Communication between the intestine and other organs such as the lungs, brain or bones is mediated by several metabolites, like short-chain fatty acids or bile acids, that relay information about nutritional and microbiota status. Bile acids are endogenous ...

EPFL2024

Multimodal transcriptomic atlases of mouse spinal cord injury

Matthieu Pierre Gautier

A spinal cord injury (SCI) triggers a cascade of molecular and cellular responses involving inflammatory cell infiltration and cytokine release, apoptosis, demyelination, excitotoxicity, ischemia, and the formation of a fibrotic scar surrounded by an astro ...

EPFL2024

Next-Generation Modeling of Cancer Using Organoids

Wouter Richard Karthaus, Jillian Rose Love

In the last decade, organoid technology has become a cornerstone in cancer research. Organoids are long-term primary cell cultures, usually of epithelial origin, grown in a three-dimensional (3D) protein matrix and a fully defined medium. Organoids can be ...

Cold Spring Harbor Lab Press, Publications Dept2024

Fluorescent fatty acid conjugates for live cell imaging of peroxisomes

Luc Reymond, Manon Sandra Bardyn, Fabien Kuttler, Daria Korotkova, Triana Amen, Milena Maria Schuhmacher

Peroxisomes are eukaryotic organelles that are essential for multiple metabolic pathways, including fatty acid oxidation, degradation of amino acids, and biosynthesis of ether lipids. Consequently, peroxisome dysfunction leads to pediatric-onset neurodegen ...

Nature Research2024

Decoding Chromatin Ubiquitylation: A Chemical Biology Perspective

Beat Fierz, Pauline Franz

Since Strahl and Allis proposed the "language of covalent histone modifications", a host of experimental studies have shed light on the different facets of chromatin regulation by epigenetic mechanisms. Initially proposed as a concept for controlling gene ...

Academic Press Ltd- Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Osmosis-driven stiffening of structured hydrogels

Esther Amstad, Ran Zhao, Alexandra Thoma

Plant cells harness osmotic pressures to stiffen their leaves through strong turgor pressures. Key to this osmosisdriven stiffening is the confinement of liquids within semipermeable membranes that can regulate the transport of water molecules and ions. In ...

Elsevier2024

Comparison of Three Viral Nucleic Acid Preamplification Pipelines for Sewage Viral Metagenomics

Tamar Kohn, Xavier Fernandez Cassi

Viral metagenomics is a useful tool for detecting multiple human viruses in urban sewage. However, more refined protocols are required for its effective use in disease surveillance. In this study, we investigated the performance of three different preampli ...

2024

Engineering hydrogel microenvironments for epithelial organoid culture

Antonius Chrisnandy

Organoids, miniature tissues generated from self-organizing stem cells within three-dimensional (3D) extracellular matrices (ECM), have opened up exciting possibilities for in vitro studies of complex physiological processes. A key factor in the success of ...

EPFL2024

Androgen Receptor Signaling in in vivo models of Estrogen Receptor-positive Breast Cancer and Normal Breast Epithelium

Andrea Agnoletto

Steroid hormone receptors (HRs) are ligand-activated transcription factors that play a pivotal role in breast development and carcinogenesis. It is well established that estrogen receptor (ER) signaling is a major proliferative driver in estrogen receptor ...

EPFL2024

Formaldehyde regulates one-carbon metabolism and epigenetics

Yimon Aye

Recently, Pham et al. used an array of model systems to uncover a role for the enzyme methionine adenosyltransferase (MAT) -1A, which is mainly expressed in liver, in both sensing formaldehyde and regulating transcriptional responses that protect against i ...

Cell Press2024