Active Motif's Podcast

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Dirk Schübeler, Director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) in Basel, Switzerland, to talk about his work on the effects of DNA methylation on chromatin structure and transcription.   Dirk Schübeler was born in Germany and started his scientific career in Braunschweig, Germany. After his postdoc at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, he joined the FMI in 2003 and never left. He was recently appointed as the Director of the FMI in March 2020.   Dirk Schübeler’s research focuses on DNA methylation and its effects on chromatin and transcription. It is widely known that DNA methylation leads to gene silencing, but many of the mechanisms and regulatory factors involved in this process remain understudied. Therefore, Dirk Schübeler and his team set out to characterize the DNA methylation profiles in normal human somatic cells and compare them with the methylation profiles in transformed human cells. More recent work in h