Seminars

Modelling of Chromosome Structure and Function Chromosomes, contrary to the popular view of the X-shaped structure, most of the time look more like a tangled spaghetti soup. Different cell types, such as muscle, liver and stem cells, share the same genetic code but have different structural patterns which correlate with the cell's function (e.g. gene expression). This talk will discuss recent research understanding chromosome structure at the molecular scale, and its relation to cell function. The talk will present results interpretted from groundbreaking experiments of the past decade (Hi-C, and more recently, single-cell Hi-C), which capture information about chromosome structure. While Hi-C experiments are useful to identify general rules of chromosome organisation on average, single-cell Hi-C experiments expose individual variations. I will show how coarse-grained molecular simulations informed by these experimental data can provide models of chromosome structure covering the whole genome. Examples will include variations of chromosome structure throughout the cell cycle, from cell-division to cell-division, and during the very early stages of embryonic development.