Just a note - I send this to everyone I know every year and people find it IMMENSELY helpful! Thank you for always doing this!

Ramping back up post paper submission

Awesome--see you at the committee meeting after the holidays--enjoy some well deserved time off!

Thanks, Alex!!! I hope all is well! Catch up soon!?

10/ (would also like to say this study had great contributions from past NIH PREP scholars at UNC, Doris Cruz Alonso & Gelila Petros, who are now doing their things at Univ of Michigan & UPitt, respectively!)

9/ Grateful to everyone that contributed to this work, especially the team of @danfengcai.bsky.social, Chenxi Xu and Greg Wang at Duke, Andrea Perreault at Elon, Zack Drum (now faculty at NC Central), and all of the Phanstiel Lab past and present! See ya at the defense! 😁

8/ In summary, hyperosmotic stress rapidly and reversibly reshapes 3D chromatin structure, revealing a CTCF-independent, promoter-based looping strategy for cellular adaptation

7/ Genes at these loop anchors activate hours after looping occurs, suggesting these structures may prime transcription, rather than trigger it immediately.

6/ And they show a strong promoter bias enriched for SP/KLF motifs, suggesting an alternative mode of loop anchoring under hyperosmotic stress!

5/ These sorbitol-induced loops do not require CTCF or YAP1, but they do require cohesin (RAD21)

4/ We see global loss of CTCF and cohesin binding, yet both are retained at anchors of these new loops

YAP1 is enriched there as well, pointing to selective architectural rewiring, not random chromatin compaction

3/ These stress-induced loops are more punctate, longer-range, and transient

Most disappear by 24 hours as global chromatin structure recovers

2/ Within 1 hour, pre-existing loops collapse + a new, distinct class of sorbitol-induced loops emerges

1/ Hyperosmotic stress doesn’t just change transcription - it rewires the 3D genome

Using time-resolved Hi-C, CUT&Tag, and auxin-inducible degrons, we tracked how 3D chromatin structure changes in human cells exposed to sorbitol