Active Motif's Podcast

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Emily Bernstein from Icahn Schoon of Medicine at Mount Sinai to talk about her work on MacroH2A function and the role of Polycomb proteins in its epigenetic regulation, and how this affects in stem cell development and disease. The Bernstein Lab focuses on histone variants, in particular the variants of macroH2A. Chromatin architecture is influenced by the composition of the nucleosome and, hence, exchanging the core histones for histone variants can have a major impact on chromatin structure. MacroH2A is the histone with the most variants, due to a 30kDa non-histone domain (macro domain) at their C-termini. This variation leads to many macroH2A variants, which have been found to have regulatory roles in the cell. Among other things the Bernstein Lab has shown that macroH2A is enriched at a critical set of Utx target genes whose expression is critical for the early stages of induced pluripotency.   References Kapoor, A., Goldberg, M. S., Cumbe