Biomechanical properties of chromatin in cancer and normal cells

在2019年，我们发表了一篇开创性的论文，表明染色质的机械特性编码在组蛋白变体中，这些变体在表观遗传学和结构上标记了诸如着丝粒等专门的基因座。自该工作以来，该领域也发表了几篇论文，在全球基因组规模上研究这一现象。我们目前的工作试图将生物物理学问题与癌症和衰老表观基因组结合起来，以了解染色质的拉伸，拥挤或其他性质的变化是否会随着疾病而改变，如果是这样，这些变化的基础是哪些因素。然后，我们预计会问是否逆转这些因素可能恢复完整的染色质网络，从而抑制致癌或衰老相关的表型在核反应应变/应力。

In 2019, we published a seminal paper showing that mechanical properties of chromatin are encoded in the histone variants which epigenetically and structurally mark specialized loci like centromeres. Since that work, several papers have also been published in the field studying this phenomenon on a global genomic scale. Our current work attempts to bring together biophysical questions to the cancer and aging epigenome, to understand whether changes in stretching, crowding, or other properties of chromatin are altered with disease, and if so, which factors underlie these changes. We then anticipate asking whether reversal of such factors might restore integrity to the chromatin meshwork, thereby suppressing oncogenic or aging related phenotypes in the nuclear response to strain/stress.