Happiness on twitter and 3D chromatin structure

Any given cell's developmental state and its future possible fates are believed to be determined by the epigenomic states of its chromatin. The epigenomic makeup of a cell not only conditions the genes that are switched on or off but also those (poised) genes that can be switched on under certain stimuli. The recent explosion of publicly available transcriptomic and epigenomic datasets allows us to investigate in more detail the cell type-specific epigenomic make-ups. In my recently established group at Newcastle University, we are aiming to understand how different chromatin organizations underly the phenotipic differences among cell types in multicellular organisms.

In this talk, I will present our works combining over hundred ChIP-seq experiments to reconstruct the first network of chromatin communication between proteins, histone marks and DNA modifications in embryonic stem cells (Juan et al. 2016) and their relationship with the three-dimensional genome structure (Pancaldi et al. 2016). I will show how approaches typically used to analyse social networks or internet connections can help to understand (1) how chromatin proteins communicate via epigenetic modifications and (2) how different proteins mediate different types of long-range genomic contacts. Finally, I will present our current efforts to understand epigemome dynamics during the cell cycle and during immune responses.