A thought-provoking piece!

🍽️🧬 How do diet and gut microbes shape fertility across generations? 🪱🔬 Our Laboratory at #InstitutPasteur is recruiting a PhD student to study epigenetic inheritance of fertility using C. elegans. Fully funded via the International PPU program. Apply now! 🌍 #PhDposition #Epigenetics #Inheritance

Is euchromatin really “open”? Our new study @bioRxiv suggests otherwise. Using super-resolution imaging @shiori-iida.bsky.social‬ @masaashimazoe.bsky.social reveals: Euchromatin forms condensed domains in live cells. Cohesin constrains them and prevents domain mixing.
www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Our paper is now out in Molecular Cell!

Check the thread in this former post:

www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Shout-out to @ydjeghmoum.bsky.social who single-handedly led this beautiful work during her PhD! Thanks @erc.europa.eu and the FRM for funding this work.

Finally, transcription specifically suppressed non-allelic recombination, while it authorized allelic repair. Consequently, transcription prevent chromosomal rearrangements between highly transcribed paralogous genes, and compensating the detrimental impact of transcription in generating DNA lesions

D-loop suppression by transcription was independent of, and even more potent than conserved recombination regulators known to promote genome maintenance and suppress tumor formation in humans (such as BLM-TOP3-RMI and FANCM homologs).

Transcription orientation mattered: co-linear orientation suppressed D-loops more efficiently than head-on orientation. This suggests the preferential usage of one DSB end for repair in highly-transcribed genes.

By putting two donors in competition and transcribing only one of them, we could show that transcription suppressed D-loops in cis! In fact, it even redirected D-loops from the transcribed to the non-transcribed donor.

This effect of transcription could be induced and repressed in minutes, suggesting it reflected a direct effect of RNA PolII passage. Indeed, secondary effect of transcription (RNA, RNA:DNA hybrids, nuclear relocalization, endogenous TFs, …) were not involved in D-loop suppression.

We used a highly efficient DNA break induction system in budding yeast, and quantified D-loops (the earliest DNA joint molecule formed upon homology identification) formed at a donor whose transcriptional level could be manipulated. Transcription caused a massive drop of D-loops.

Transcription and recombination are two universal DNA-dependent processes, but how they are coordinated remains largely unknown. Here we characterized transcription-recombination priority rules in yeast. 🧵 www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Are you ready for the 2nd half of 2025? Social DNAing is ready. Check out the speaker list and schedule! Sign up at www.cancer.columbia.edu/research/pro...

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Super excited to share my first preprint from @andersshansen.bsky.social Lab! We used MINFLUX to track chromatin (H2B-Halo and Fbn2 locus) at an unprecedented 200 μs, then combined it with SPT to span μs-minutes (H2B) or SPT & Super-Res Live-Cell Imaging (SRLCI) to span μs-hours (Fbn2)

How does replication shapes the 3D organization of chromosomes? Check out this new preprint from our colleagues @djost-physbiol.bsky.social that investigates this question using a full polymer model of the budding yeast genome + new S-phase Hi-C data. Congrats to the lead author Dario D'Asaro!

Come start your lab in beautiful Strasbourg 🇫🇷 www.nature.com/naturecareer...

!! Postdoc position available to study homologous recombination in live cells through advanced microscopy analyses in a collaboration between our lab and Angela Taddei's lab, both at @institutcurie.bsky.social in Paris.
Apply to : [email protected]

Happy to share our latest pre-print!
We solved the cryoEM structures of human DNA repair factor MRN bound to DNA and to TRF2. Main work of Yilan, Filiz @filizkuybu.bsky.social and Hengjun. Great collab within the @sfb1361.bsky.social and @genecenter-lmu.bsky.social 🧬🔨
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

*Lyon* #StandUpForScience
Place des Terreaux à 16h : Rassemblement. Cet événement est un acte de solidarité envers nos collègues américains.​ Ensemble, affirmons notre engagement en faveur d’une science indépendante, accessible à toutes et tous.​

Once upon a time, in the late 1800s, people in Japan got really into breeding mice.

Coloured mice. Patterned mice. Even mice that danced.

They became known as Japanese Fancy Mice, and that caught the attention of researchers in Europe and America, who imported them for study.

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Are you curious about eukaryotic plasmids?
PhD student Fabien Girard with Axel Cournac in the lab explore the positioning of plasmid 2u, one of these rare (known) episomes, in the budding yeast nucleus. The results were surprising.
#plasmids #chromatin #3Dgenome

www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

A completely mind-blowing mechanism at the organism structural level to limit mutation accumulation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Yasmina will soon finish her PhD and be on the postdoc market: you know what you have to do! Many thanks to our funding source @erc.europa.eu for allowing us to carry out this work.

Finally, Yasmina could show that transcription also suppressed the formation of chromosomal rearrangements between repeated elements formed by recombination, independently of other recombination regulators.