A Long Journey into Epigenome engineering comes to an end

Not all projects need to be about evolution! This would be the first project in which no phylogenetic trees were used at any stage, as it focuses on human cell lines and epigenome engineering approaches. We generated an artificial zinc finger fused to DNMT3A to methylate thousands of promoters in the human genome. This revealed some surprising transcriptional responses, showing that not all genes got silenced, and we used several epigenomic profiling techniques to understand the potential differences across these promoters. Also, we found that methylation did not last long in either promoters or enhancers, driven by Transcription Factor binding. This project took some years to finish, yet was a nice collaboration with the Lister Lab.

To read more, have a look at the paper here: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-022-02728-5.

For a "tweetorial" about the main findings, check this: https://twitter.com/deMendoza_Alex/status/1551917337128886272?s=20&t=ZeyNylC5jlNMIN008u_Bmg