Author: biota

Cell biologists identify first events in stem cells becoming specialized cells needed for organ development. Read more in U of T Arts and Science News.

Congratulations to Dr Sakthi Moorthy on being awarded an OIRM Travel Award to present her research at ISSCR2018 in Melbourne, Australia.

Luís, Gurdeep and Neil presented posters at the 6^th Canadian Conference on Epigenetics November 17-20 in Banff, Alberta

Taking inspiration from The Dance by Henri Matisse a diverse group of people, representing diverse transcription factor proteins, dance on enhancer DNA (red). This dynamic interaction of ten different transcription factors with the DNA is required for robust transcription output, represented by the fire and the emerging transcripts (white). Receding in the distance the DNA is occupied by nucleosomes (brown). Enhancers are an important part of the non-coding genome, critical for development, phenotype evolution and often mutated in disease contexts. Despite this importance, we lack a sequence level understanding of enhancers; the sequence code conferring enhancer activity was unknown even for well-studied cell types. In this issue, a conserved regulatory code of more than 70 transcription factor binding sequences was identified that drives gene expression in pluripotent stem cells. Using a diverse set of more than ten transcription factor binding sequences from this repertoire of 70 was sufficient to construct short synthetic enhancers with the activity of native enhancers. Transcription factor number and diversity are both important for enhancer activity revealing new insight into the regulatory code for pluripotent cells. This paper can be accessed on the latest edition of Genome Research.

Credit: Concept and Illustration by Ian Hsu.

Congratulations to Luís Abatti who was awarded the Zoology International Scholarship in Cell & Systems Biology!

We were one of several labs in the CSB department which received an NSERC Discovery Grant.

Our Genome Research paper: Enhancers and super-enhancers have an equivalent regulatory role in embryonic stem cells through regulation of single or multiple genes is out!

Professor Mitchell was Keynote Speaker at the Asilomar Chromatin, Chromosomes, and Epigenetics Conference in Pacific Grove, California, USA. Dr Macpherson presented a talk.

Gurdeep Singh has been chosen for the Elizabeth Ann Wintercorbyn Award, presented to a graduate student in CSB engaged in research work likely to prove beneficial to Medicine.