Biomechanical properties of chromatin in cancer and normal cells

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是在组蛋白变体中编码的，这些组蛋白变体在表观遗传和结构上标记着着丝粒等特殊位点。自那以后，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癌症和衰老表观基因组的生物物理问题结合起来，以了解染色质的拉伸、拥挤或其他特性的变化是否随着疾病而改变，如果是这样，哪些因素导致了这些变化。然后，我们期望询问这些因素的逆转是否可能恢复染色质网络的完整性，从而抑制对应变/压力的核反应中的致癌或衰老相关表型。

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.