Seminar room RB35 (Roslagstullsbacken 35, the SBC house)
Description
Metastable, reversible gene expression patterns contribute to developmental plasticity, homeostasis and adaptation. Regulatory networks have been successfully captured to describe important principles underlying these features (1, 2). However, while the focus has been on the implementors, i.e. transcription networks, protein interactomes etc, the regulatory machinery at the chromatin/chromosome level is poorly understood. Work during the last few years has indicated that direct physical interactions between chromosomes act as novel regulators of the expressivity of the genome (3). These interactions are not only governed by epigenetic states (4), but also modulate the epigenome by transvecting and stabilizing epigenetic states, such as DNA methylation (5) and replication timing, (6, 7). Here I propose that such networks organize dynamic physical structures consisting of nodes, connectors and outliers to both coordinate and diversify the transcriptome.
1. A. L. Barabasi, R. Albert, Science 286, 509 (1999).
2. S. Maslov, K. Sneppen, Science 296, 910 (2002).
3. A. Gondor, R. Ohlsson, Nature 461, 212 (2009).
4. Z. Zhao et al., Nat Genet 38, 1341 (2006).
5. S. Kurukuti et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 103, 10684 (2006).
6. A. Gondor, R. Ohlsson, Nat Rev Genet 10, 269 (2009).
7. K. S. Sandhu et al., Genes Dev 23, 2598 (2009).
