While we have traditionally focused on 5-methylcytosine DNA (5mC) methylation in the laboratory, we started exploring 6-methyladenine (6mA) some years ago with Pedro Romero Charria, the lab's second PhD student. The field was a bit messy since there have been high profile reports saying 6mA is present in all sorts of model systems, including mammals, plants or flies. However, this was also heavily contested. We decided to check for ourselves, since the scattered reports from ciliates, early...

After discovering that DNA methylation plays a key role in silencing hundreds of viral insertions in the protist  Amoebidium , we began...

Today the paper led by our collaborators Iana Kim and Arnau Sebe-Pedrós lab in Barcelona got published in Nature :...