Publication

Crosslinking Allosteric Sites on the Nucleosome

Publications associées (31)

A chemical biology approach to decipher chromatin ubiquitylation by RNF168

DNA damage signaling following DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) involves numerous regulating proteins, which dynamically recognize ('read') and alter ('write' or 'erase') histone post-translational modifications (PTMs). Among these PTMs, the ubiquitin syste ...

EPFL2024

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

Revealing chromatin-specific functions of histone deacylases

Beat Fierz, Carlos Moreno Yruela

Histone deacylases are erasers of Nε-acyl-lysine post-translational modifications and have been targeted for decades for the treatment of cancer, neurodegeneration and other disorders. Due to their relatively promiscuous activity on peptide substrates in v ...

2024

Inheritance of H3K9 methylation regulates genome architecture in Drosophila early embryos

Fides Zenk

Constitutive heterochromatin is essential for transcriptional silencing and genome integrity. The establishment of constitutive heterochromatin in early embryos and its role in early fruitfly development are unknown. Lysine 9 trimethylation of histone H3 ( ...

Springernature2024

From Sequence to Dynamics to Function: Computational Design of Allostery and Ligand Selectivity in G-Protein Coupled Receptors

Mahdi Hijazi

The phenomenon of allostery, a general property in proteins that has been heralded as "the second secret of life" remains elusive to our understanding and even more challenging to incorporate into protein design. One example of allosteric proteins with gre ...

EPFL2024

Pan-cancer atlas of somatic core and linker histone mutations

Sebastian Martin Waszak

Recent genomic data points to a growing role for somatic mutations altering core histone and linker histone-encoding genes in cancer. However, the prevalence and the clinical and biological implications of histone gene mutations in malignant tumors remain ...

2023

Development of multiplexed single-molecule imaging techniques to study chromatin invasion dynamics of chromatin effector proteins

Kristina Makasheva

DNA-binding proteins physically interact with the DNA and directly affect genomic functions. The eukaryotic genome is compacted into chromatin, limiting the DNA access to nuclear factors. In this Ph.D. thesis, I explored the dynamic mechanisms, that allow ...

EPFL2023

Whole genome doubling promotes tumorigenesis through loss of chromatin segregation and compartment repositioning

Ruxandra-Andreea Lambuta

Whole genome doubling (WGD) events are drivers of genetic innovation across vertebrate evolution. While generally detrimental to mammalian organisms, WGDs are crucial in the development of various plants and fungi, as well as for the terminal differentiati ...

EPFL2023

Multivalent Peptide Ligands To Probe the Chromocenter Microenvironment in Living Cells

Nora Guidotti, Maxime Nicolas Mivelaz, Beat Fierz, Pablo Rivera Fuentes, Adam Miklos Eördögh

Chromatin is spatially organized into functional states that are defined by both the presence of specific histone post-translational modifications (PTMs) and a defined set of chromatin-associated “reader” proteins. Different models for the underlying mecha ...

2022

Epigenetic plasticity as a signature for memory allocation

Giulia Santoni

Long-lasting memories are stored in a small set of neurons scattered throughout the brain, so-called engram cells. To define a stable engram each region of the brain involved in memory storage recruits between 5 and 20 percent of excitatory neurons. In par ...

EPFL2022

Class I histone deacetylases (HDAC1-3) are histone lysine delactylases

Di Zhang, Alexander Lund Nielsen, Carlos Moreno Yruela

Lysine L-lactylation [K(L-la)] is a newly discovered histone mark stimulated under conditions of high glycolysis, such as the Warburg effect. K(L-la) is associated with functions that are different from the widely studied histone acetylation. While K(L-la) ...

2022

Context-dependent enhancer function revealed by targeted inter-TAD relocation

Denis Duboule, Guillaume Andrey, Christopher Chase Bolt, Lucille Delisle, Aurélie Hintermann

Here the authors show that a strong enhancer sequence can be controlled by the chromatin environment provided by a topologically associated domain (TAD) located nearby. An enhancer relocated by homologous recombination takes all the hallmarks of its new ne ...

Nature Portfolio2022

Histone acetylation dynamics modulates chromatin conformation and allele-specific interactions at oncogenic loci

Elisa Oricchio, Natalya Katanayeva, Stephanie Jocelyne Sungalee, Ruxandra-Andreea Lambuta, Giovanni Ciriello, Daniele Tavernari

In cancer cells, enhancer hijacking mediated by chromosomal alterations and/or increased deposition of acetylated histone H3 lysine 27 (H3K27ac) can support oncogene expression. However, how the chromatin conformation of enhancer-promoter interactions is a ...

2021

Applying Peptide and Protein Synthesis to Study Post-translational Modifications in Epigenetics and Beyond

Beat Fierz

Epigenetics research focuses on the study of heritable gene regulatory mechanisms that do not involve changes of the DNA sequence. Such mechanisms include post-translational modifications of histone proteins that organize the genome in the nucleus into a n ...

2021

Chromatin Proteomics to Study Epigenetics - Challenges and Opportunities

Guido Van Mierlo

Regulation of gene expression is essential for the functioning of all eukaryotic organisms. Understanding gene expression regulation requires determining which proteins interact with regulatory elements in chromatin. MS-based analysis of chromatin has emer ...

AMER SOC BIOCHEMISTRY MOLECULAR BIOLOGY INC2021

Toward a mechanistic understanding of variable chromatin modules

Gerard Llimos Aubach

Our genome is a long sequence of DNA that contains all the information to be able to constitute a living organism like us, similarly to what the letters in a book do to create a story. This sequence, which is a stretch of molecules called nucleotides, is a ...

EPFL2021

Dynamic Chromatin Invasion and Remodeling by the Transcription Factor Rap1

Maxime Nicolas Mivelaz

Pioneer transcription factors (PTF) are a subset of transcription factors with nucleosome-binding properties allowing them to bind specific sequences in condensed chromatin. Although the biological functions of PTFs including target genes and epigenetic ch ...

EPFL2021

High throughput screening identifies SOX2 as a super pioneer factor that inhibits DNA methylation maintenance at its binding sites

Ludovica Vanzan

Binding of mammalian transcription factors (TFs) to regulatory regions is hindered by chromatin compaction and DNA methylation of their binding sites. Nevertheless, pioneer transcription factors (PFs), a distinct class of TFs, have the ability to access nu ...

Nature Research2021

Allosteric modulators enhance agonist efficacy by increasing the residence time of a GPCR in the active state

Anne-Marinette Thi Phuong Hanh Cao

Here, the authors use smFRET to assess the structural dynamics of metabotropic glutamate receptor mGlu2 and show that a positive allosteric modulator or the Gi protein stabilize mGlu2 in the glutamate-induced active state, leading to the full activation of ...

Nature Portfolio2021

Epigenetic remodelling of enhancers in response to estrogen deprivation and re-stimulation

Ludovica Vanzan

Estrogen hormones are implicated in a majority of breast cancers and estrogen receptor alpha (ER), the main nuclear factor mediating estrogen signaling, orchestrates a complex molecular circuitry that is not yet fully elucidated. Here, we investigated geno ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2021