Enhancer-Promoter Interactions During Development (Yad Ghavi-Helm)

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Yad Ghavi-Helm from the Institut de Génomique Functionnelle de Lyon to talk about her work on enhancer-promoter interactions during development.
The Laboratory of Yad Ghavi-Helm focuses on how developmental genes are regulated by enhancers. Their work shows that developmental genes are often regulated by more than one enhancer and that those enhancers can often be located many kilobases away on the linear chromosome. Furthermore, their research also indicates that the interactions between promoters and their respective enhancers are usually established before the expression of the target gene is switched on, and that those interactions are generally stable during embryogenesis. In addition, those stable interactions seem to coincide with paused RNA Pol II being located at those promoters before gene activation.
References

Ghavi-Helm, Y., Michaut, M., Acker, J., Aude, J.-C., Thuriaux, P., Werner, M., & Soutourina, J. (2008). Genome-wide location analysis reveals a role of TFIIS in RNA polymerase III transcription. Genes & Development, 22(14), 1934–1947. https://doi.org/10.1101/gad.471908


Ghavi-Helm, Y., Klein, F. A., Pakozdi, T., Ciglar, L., Noordermeer, D., Huber, W., & Furlong, E. E. M. (2014). Enhancer loops appear stable during development and are associated with paused polymerase. Nature, 512(7512), 96–100. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13417


Ghavi-Helm, Y., Jankowski, A., Meiers, S., Viales, R. R., Korbel, J. O., & Furlong, E. E. M. (2019). Highly rearranged chromosomes reveal uncoupling between genome topology and gene expression. Nature Genetics, 51(8), 1272–1282. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-019-0462-3
 


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