Investigating the role of cohesin in chromatin organization and transcriptional activity

The three-dimensional organization of DNA chromatin within the nucleus has been long shown to be highly interconnected with gene expression and crucial for the correct functioning of the cell. It has been observed that cohesin plays a key role in organizing the genome by extruding loops that stop at convergent occupied CTCF binding sites. However, the effect of cohesion on the transcriptional regulatory network of the cell has not yet been completely understood [1].

In this poster, I will present simulation data on my recent work where I have been investigating the role played by cohesin in shaping chromatin architecture as well as its predicted effects on gene expression regulation on a chromosomal scale. To obtain the results, I have been using the Highly Predictive Heteromorphic Polymer (HiP-HoP) model [2], which allows for polymer physics knowledge to be integrated with biological data.

[1]  Rao et al., Cohesin Loss Eliminates All Loop Domains, Cell, 2017.

[2] Buckle et al., Polymer Simulations of Heteromorphic Chromatin Predict the 3D Folding of Complex Genomic Loci, Molecular Cell, 2018.