🚀 PREPRINT ALERT!

🐸 Research led by our PI @evahoermanseder.bsky.social reveals H3K4 methylation as an epigenetic memory in Xenopus embryos, vital for zygotic genome activation & development.

👏 Congratulations @meghana-oak.bsky.social & rest of authors.

📑 👀 shorturl.at/6MIRn

🔎 #OpenPeerReview

𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐝𝐨 𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐃𝐍𝐀 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧? Our new study “Disabling leading and lagging strand histone transmission results in parental histones loss and reduced cell plasticity and viability” is out in 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘈𝘥𝘷𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘴. Led by @lleonie.bsky.social @biranalva.bsky.social 🧵 More below👇

Looking forward to a great discussion!

Next Wed 12.02. at 6pm CET I will be speaking about our latest preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... and present our findings on how we developed a machine learning model that identified new reprogramming barriers, such as H3K27ac, and our in vivo experiments to test it. See you there!

I am thrilled to share that our latest pre-print from the @evahoermanseder.bsky.social lab 🐸🧬, is now online! Check it out here:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Highlights and key findings from our study in the thread below 👇

This project has been the focus of my PhD over the last four years and I couldn’t have done it without the support of my co-authors, especially Marco Stock and Eva Hörmanseder, and many others. A huge thank you to all who contributed to this work!
@marcostock.bsky.social @evahoermanseder.bsky.social

Finally, we identify that H3K4 methyltransferases Kmt2b and Cxxc1 are key players in ensuring H3K4 methylation-mediated transcriptional memory in these early, transcriptionally silent embryos.

Notably, by depleting H3K4 methylation specifically in the transcriptionally silent window before ZGA, we show that maintenance of H3K4 methylation patterning in pre-ZGA embryos is crucial for proper ZGA and expression of pluripotency factors.

We correlated this with distinct configurations of chromatin accessibility, DNA methylation and GC content, explored for the first time in Xenopus pre-ZGA embryos!

Also, we found that H3K4me3 is mostly maintained from gametes to embryos, separated by a transcriptionally silent phase. Surprisingly, this maintenance was at promoters of genes that were transcribed in the gametes and are activated again during ZGA in the embryo.

Active histone modifications, such as H3K4me3, have long been thought to be dependent on transcription factor binding and active gene transcription. Despite this, we show that H3K4me3 can be found in non-transcribing and fast-replicating Xenopus embryos before zygotic genome activation (ZGA).

✨ Excited to share my latest preprint on how H3K4 methylation promotes transcriptional memory from gametes to embryos across a transcriptionally silent window — crucial for proper zygotic genome activation and development. 🐸🧬✨

📄 Check it out here:
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

👇 Highlights below