Mattia Conte, "Polymer physics of chromosome architecture and function"

Wednesday 23 Oct 2024, 16:00 → 17:00 Europe/Rome

0M04

Human chromosomes have a complex 3D organization in the cell nucleus that serves vital functional purposes as, for instance, genes have to establish specific physical contacts with distal DNA regulators to control transcriptional activities. However, it is largely unknown how the system self-organizes to shape its folding and functions. In this seminar, I discuss our recent results from polymer physics, confirmed by molecular biology experiments, showing that chromosome spatial organization is controlled by thermodynamic mechanisms of phase transitions, such as micro-phase separations or coil-globule transitions [1,2]. Those findings trace back the comprehension of the very functioning of our genome to simple principles of physics and can be successfully employed, for example, to predict in-silico the effects of disease-associated mutations linked to congenital disorders or cancer [3,4].

[1] Conte et al. Nature Comm., 11, 3289 (2020)

[2] Conte et al. Nature Comm. 13, 4070 (2022)

[3] Huang et al. Nature Gen., 53, 1064–1074 (2021)

[4] Conte et al., preprint at bioRxiv, 2023.07.17.549291 (2024)