Inside the cellular nucleus, genomic DNA is tightly packed into a polymer-like structure called chromatin. In the last decades, technological advances coupled to quantitative data analysis and modeling had changed our view on how the genome is organized and how such an organization may have functional role in the regulation of many key biological processes like transcription. In particular, chromatin organization is multi-scale, ranging from nucleosomes (~10 nm, ~100bp) to chromosome territories (~1 μm, ~10 Mbp). In this seminar, after an overview of our current knowledge on how genome self-organizes, I will present some of our recent works on the mechanisms driving the spatio-temporal dynamics of chromosomes.

Contact: Emmanuelle Bignon