Crossroads between transposons and gene regulation

Deborah Bourc’his is heading the Epigenetic Decisions and reproduction group in the Department of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Institut Curie in Paris. Her work as a PhD student was related to the effects of abnormal DNA methylation patterns on development and health, through the study of mouse cloned embryos and the human ICF syndrome. During her post-doc in the laboratory of Timothy Bestor at Columbia University (New York), she revealed that mammals rely on DNMT3L - a DNA methylation co-factor - to set up DNA methylation patterns in their germ lines, and this impacts both genomic imprinting and transposon control. More recently, she demonstrated that failure to repress transposons remodels the chromatin landscape of spermatocytes and interferes with the process of meiotic recombination. Her lab also identified a new DNA methyltransferase enzyme, DNMT3C, which selectively silences the most aggressive transposons during spermatogenesis. Finally, her work illustrated that several chromatin adaptative responses can suppress transposons when DNA methylation is defective.

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Joanna Wysocka is a Professor in the Department of Chemical and Systems Biology and the Department of Developmental Biology at Stanford University, a Member of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and an HHMI Investigator. Joanna Wysocka did her PhD work at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory with Dr Winship Herr and, after graduating in 2003, postdoctoral training at the Rockefeller University with Dr David Allis. Joanna's research is focused on understanding gene regulatory mechanisms in human development, disease and evolution. Her lab is employing a broad combination of genomic, genetic, biochemical, biophysical, single-cell and embryological approaches in a number of cellular and organismal models to investigate functions of the non-coding parts of the genome, understand regulatory mechanisms underlying stem cell function, cellular plasticity and differentiation, investigate how quantitative changes in gene expression dictate differences in human traits, and study craniofacial development and variation. Dr Wysocka is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Searle Scholar Award, W.M. Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Scholar Award, ISSCR Outstanding Young Investigator Award, and Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.

Maria-Elena did her undergraduate studies at the Faculty of Sciences of the UNAM, Mexico and obtained her PhD at the Institut Pasteur, Paris in 2002. She was a postdoctoral fellow at The Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, UK between 2002 and 2006 and then worked as a senior scientist with Laszlo Tora. She started her own lab at the IGBMC in Strasbourg, France in December 2008. She is currently the Director of the Institute of Epigenetics and Stem Cells in Munich, where the lab moved in January 2016. Her research group is focused on studying the epigenetics and cell fate in early mammalian development. In mammals, epigenetic reprogramming, the acquisition and loss of totipotency, and the first cell fate decision all occur within a three-day window after fertilization of the oocyte. Molecularly, these processes are poorly understood, yet this knowledge is an essential prerequisite to uncover principles of stem cells, chromatin biology and thus regenerative medicine. Specifically, the Torres-Padilla Lab investigates the dynamics of de novo heterochromatin formation in mammalian embryos; the chromatin remodelling mechanisms and its impacts on cellular plasticity and establishment of totipotency.

Molly Gale Hammell is an associate professor of quantitative biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The Hammell lab focuses on the contribution of retrotransposons to neurodegenerative disease, with a particular focus on the motor neuron disease ALS. As part of this work, the Hammell laboratory has developed multiple software packages for including transposable elements derived reads in sequencing data analysis. Dr Gale Hammell is a Milton Cassel Fellow of the Rita Allen Foundation, and has received the Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Award.

R Keith Slotkin is a Principal Investigator at the Donald Danforth Science Center in St Louis Missouri and an Associate Professor in the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri. Dr Slotkin has been investigating how transposable elements are first triggered for epigenetic silencing since an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona. Today, the Slotkin laboratory distinguishes the initial stages of silencing into two pathways: Homology-based and expression-dependent initiation of epigenetic silencing. Projects in the laboratory focus on the molecular dissection of both pathways, as well as determining how transposable element activity influences gene expression and genome function in plants.

Olivier Panaud is a full Professor at the University of Perpignan and leader of the Genome analysis and evolution team in the Plant Genome and Development laboratory (UPVD/CNRS). He is senior member of Institut Universitaire de France (promotion 2015). His research area is evolutionary genomics with a particular focus on the impact of transposable elements on the structure, the function and the evolution of plant genomes. He obtained his PhD in 2012 at the University of Orsay (Paris XI) for the research he conducted at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. He then completed two post-doctoral projects, one at the Plant breeding and Biometry Department in Cornell University (NY, USA) from 1992 to 1995 and the second one at the University of Orsay at the Evolution and Systematics Department from 1995 to 1997. He then became Assistant Professor at the University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI). He has been full Professor at the University of Perpignan since 2003. Olivier PANAUD authored or co-authored 72 publications (H-index of 34). From 2008 to 2012 he was Vice-President for Research of University of Perpignan and is currently Vice-President for Research of COMUE Languedoc Roussillon (2017-2021).

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Didier Trono MD completed a clinical training in pathology, internal medicine and infectious diseases in Geneva and at Massachusetts General Hospital and post-doctoral studies at MIT’s Whitehead Institute. In 1990, he moved to the Salk Institute to launch a center for AIDS research. From 1997 to 2004, he was at the University of Geneva before joining the EPFL as dean of its newly launched School of Life Sciences, a position he held for eight years. He now steers the Health 2030 Initiative, which aims at fostering the advent of personalized health in Switzerland. Didier Trono’s research has long gravitated around interactions between viruses and their hosts. This led him first to the development of tools for gene therapy, then to epigenetics, where his work on mobile genetic elements and their controllers is providing new insights into human biology and promising leads for precision medicine.

Dr Michelle Percharde is an epigenetics and stem cell biologist, with a particular interest in understanding the role of transposable elements during development. She carried out her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge and PhD in reprogramming and nuclear receptors at Imperial College, London. In 2013, she moved to UCSF in San Francisco and was awarded a CIRM postdoctoral fellowship to carry out her postdoctoral training with Prof. Miguel Ramalho-Santos. She moved to Imperial College and the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences (LMS) as an independent fellow in 2018.

Kathleen Burns, MD, PhD, is a Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Her research laboratory studies roles mobile DNAs play in human disease. Her group was among the first to develop a targeted method for amplifying mobile DNA insertion sites in the human genome, showing that these are a significant source of structural variation in human populations. The lab has ongoing projects focused on discerning the functional consequences of inherited and somatically-acquired mobile element insertions, and exciting evidence that germline Alu insertions may predispose to disease phenotypes. Her lab also studies expression and activity of Long INterspersed Element-1 (LINE-1) in cancer.

Biography not yet available

Dr King Jordan is an Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences and Director of the Bioinformatics Graduate Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr Jordan has an educational background in the life sciences along with more than 20 years of research experience in bioinformatics. He received a BS in Biology from the University of Colorado (1992) and a PhD in Genetics from the University of Georgia (1998). Before coming to Georgia Tech in 2006, Dr Jordan trained at the US National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Members of Dr Jordan’s laboratory at Georgia Tech (jordan.biology.gatech.edu) conduct bioinformatics research with an emphasis on the analysis of ‘big data’ for understanding the molecular genetic determinants of human health. His group’s research efforts involve both the development and application of computational tools specifically tailored for genomic sequence analysis as well as various ‘omics’ functional analyses.

Cédric Feschotte received his PhD in 2001 from the University Pierre & Marie Curie in Paris during which he characterized mosquito transposable elements with Professor Claude Mouchès. He then joined the group of Dr Susan Wessler at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA as a postdoctoral fellow where he contributed to elucidate the origin and amplification mechanism of 'MITE' transposons in plant genomes. In 2004, he became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Texas, Arlington where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2009. In 2012, he joined the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City. Since July 2017 he has been a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. His laboratory uses an integrative approach to study the evolution and biological impact of various forms of mobile DNA, with an emphasis on the genomes of vertebrates.