Active Motif's Podcast

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Déborah Bourc'his from L'Institut Curie in Paris to talk about her work on the role of DNA methylation in mammalian development. During her postdoc years Déborah Bourc'his was able to characterize DNMT3L, a protein with unknown function at that time. It turned out that this protein is the cofactor responsible for stimulating DNA methylation activity in both the male and the female germline. Later on she discovered a novel DNA methylation enzyme called DNMT3C, which was unknown because it was not properly annotated, there was no sign of expression, and it was only expressed in male fetal germ cells. Furthermore, this enzyme only evolved in rodents, as a defense against young transposons. In this episode we discuss the story behind how Déborah Bourc'his was able to discover and characterize the DNA methylation enzymes DNMT3L and DNMT3C and their role in mammalian development.   References R. Duffie, S. Ajjan, … D. Bourc’his (2014) The Gpr1/Zd