Since Strahl and Allis proposed the "language of covalent histone modifications", a host of experimental studies have shed light on the different facets of chromatin regulation by epigenetic mechanisms. Initially proposed as a concept for controlling gene ...
Post-translational modifications (PTMs) play a pivotal role in regulating protein structure, interaction, and function. Aberrant PTM patterns are associated with diseases. Moreover, individual PTMs have a complex interaction with each other, known as PTM c ...
Cell fate progression of pluripotent progenitors is strictly regulated, resulting in high human cell diversity. Epigenetic modifications also orchestrate cell fate restriction. Unveiling the epigenetic mechanisms underlying human cell diversity has been di ...
The adaptation of organisms to their environment depends on the innovative potential inherent to genetic variation. In complex organisms such as mammals, processes like development and immunity require tight gene regulation. Complex forms emerge more often ...
Cartilage homeostasis, crucial for musculoskeletal function, is orchestrated by interconnected biophysical cues. In healthy cartilage, repetitive compressive loading not only elicits a range of mechanical stimuli but also induces a gradual transient temper ...
As the fundamental machinery orchestrating cellular functions, proteins influence the state of every cell profoundly. As cells exhibit significant variations from one to another, analyzing the proteome on a single-cell level is imperative to unravel their ...
Constitutive heterochromatin is essential for transcriptional silencing and genome integrity. The establishment of constitutive heterochromatin in early embryos and its role in early fruitfly development are unknown. Lysine 9 trimethylation of histone H3 ( ...
The field of protein design has made remarkable progress over the past decade. Historically, the low reliability of purely structure-based design methods limited their application, but recent strategies that combine structure-based and sequence-based calcu ...
Cis-genetic effects are key determinants of transcriptional divergence in discrete tissues and cell types. However, how cis- and trans-effects act across continuous trajectories of cellular differentiation in vivo is poorly understood. Here, we quantify al ...
In the domain of computational structural biology, predicting protein interactions based on molecular structure remains a pivotal challenge. This thesis delves into this challenge through a series of interconnected studies.The first chapter introduces th ...
Proteins are foundational biomolecules of life playing a crucial role in a myriad of biological processes. Their function often requires interplay with other biomolecules, including proteins themselves. Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are essential for ...
Bacteria are ubiquitous single cellular organisms. Compared to eukaryotic cells, bacteria have two unique characteristics: the membrane-less nucleoid and the cell wall built of peptidoglycan (PG). In most bacteria, a single circular chromosome is compacted ...
Borrowing some quotes from Harper Lee's novel "To Kill A Mockingbird" to help frame our manuscript, we discuss methods to profile local proteomes. We initially focus on chemical biology regimens that function in live organisms and use reactive biotin speci ...
Recently, Pham et al. used an array of model systems to uncover a role for the enzyme methionine adenosyltransferase (MAT) -1A, which is mainly expressed in liver, in both sensing formaldehyde and regulating transcriptional responses that protect against i ...
Recently, single-particle cryo-electron microscopy emerged as a technique capable of determining protein structures at near-atomic resolution and resolving protein dynamics with a temporal resolution ranging from second to milliseconds. This thesis describ ...
Background & Aims: Current therapies for the treatment of alcohol-related liver disease (ALD) have proven largely ineffective. Patients relapse and the disease progresses even after liver transplantation. Altered epigenetic mechanisms are characteristic of ...
Analysis of single-cell datasets generated from diverse organisms offers unprecedented opportunities to unravel fundamental evolutionary processes of conservation and diversification of cell types. However, interspecies genomic differences limit the joint ...
Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) play a crucial role in an organism's response to changing environmental conditions. Cellular behaviors typically result from the integration of multiple gene outputs, and their regulation often demands precise control of num ...
Growing evidence indicates that transposable elements (TEs) play important roles in evolution by providing genomes with coding and non-coding sequences. Identification of TE-derived functional elements, however, has relied on TE annotations in individual s ...
The phenomenon of allostery, a general property in proteins that has been heralded as "the second secret of life" remains elusive to our understanding and even more challenging to incorporate into protein design. One example of allosteric proteins with gre ...
