Emmanuel Cazottes

SOOOO MANY GENOMICS MODELSSSS! 😱 Often unclear which is best since they benchmark differently! In this preprint, we introduce GAME, a new framework that utilizes APIs to enable sustainable, uniform model evaluation so we can see which is actually best for each task. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Enhancer adoption by an LTR retrotransposon generates viral-like particles, causing developmental limb phenotypes - Nature Genetics Activation of an LTR retrotransposon inserted upstream of the Fgf8 gene produces viral-like particles in the mouse developing limb, triggering apoptosis and causing limb malformation. This phenotype c...

Finally out! 🥳 Our paper showing how a transposable element (TE) insertion can cause developmental phenotypes is now published @natgenet.nature.com 🧬🦠🐁
Below is a brief description of the major findings. Check the full version of the paper for more details: www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02248-5

Black and white photos of a thylacine (now extinct) and a grey wolf, in the same pose, looking pretty similar!

Lateral adult skull of the c. thylacine and d. wolf. Ventral adult cranium of the e. thylacine and f. wolf. They also look pretty similar!

We tile through ~300 ultra conserved elements 10bp at a time in 6 taxa (some alive, some extinct), to ask, are they the reason the two skulls below- separated by 160 million years of evolution - are so similar?

(image from former PhD student Laura Cook)

The evolutionary foundations of transcriptional regulation in animals www.nature.com/articles/s41... (read free: rdcu.be/evDcA) 🧬🖥️🧪

CAGT was fun! Thanks @carldeboer.bsky.social @sudpinglay.bsky.social and the de Boer lab for organizing! Folks from Seattle, Oregon, and other places. Great community. Arman gave a usual super talk, and Sanchit and Dayag won poster prizes☺️

Wissenschaftliche*r Mitarbeiter*in/ Postdoc (m/f/d) Chromatin ist nicht unbeweglich. Es handelt sich um ein hochdynamisches Material, dessen 3D-Struktur zentrale genomische Prozesse – von der Transkription bis zur DNA-Reparatur – steuert. Doch wie verhält sich Chromatin als Material – als Flüssigkeit, Feststoff oder viskoelastisches Gel –, um diese Funktionen in lebenden Zellen auszuführen? Ohne eine Antwort auf diese Frage können wir nicht vollständig verstehen, wie Chromatin bei Krankheiten gestört wird.

Postdoc🚨!

Come join our HFSP team to uncover how chromatin moves in cells and what this means for genome function! Great opportunity to combine single-cell genomics, live imaging and polymer physics in the unique mammalian retina with @andersshansen.bsky.social, Davide Michieletto & Sandra Tenreiro

EPIGENETIC HULK READY TO SMASH AGAIN! GET IN LOSERS!

Conservation of regulatory elements with highly diverged sequences across large evolutionary distances Nature Genetics - Combining functional genomic data from mouse and chicken with a synteny-based strategy identifies positionally conserved cis-regulatory elements in the absence of direct sequence...

How to find Evolutionary Conserved Enhancers in 2025? 🐣-🐭
Check out our paper - fresh off the press!!!
We find widespread functional conservation of enhancers in absence of sequence homology
Including: a bioinformatic tool to map sequence-diverged enhancers!
rdcu.be/enVDN
github.com/tobiaszehnde...

🧠 Excited to share my main PhD project! We mapped the regulatory rules governing Glioblastoma plasticity using single-cell multi-omics and deep learning. This work is part of a two-paper series with @bayraktarlab.bsky.social @oliverstegle.bsky.social and @moritzmall.bsky.social, Preprint at end🧵👇

Join us on Wednesday next week for two exciting talks on transcription regulation from @kasitc.bsky.social and @davidsuter.bsky.social!

You can register at: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Very happy to share the peer-reviewed version of our paper in which we study the formation and function of pair-wise and multi-way enhancer-promoter interactions in gene regulation (see thread below): www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Gag proteins encoded by endogenous retroviruses are required for zebrafish development | PNAS Transposable elements (TEs) make up the bulk of eukaryotic genomes and examples abound of TE-derived sequences repurposed for organismal function. ...

💥🥳 At long last, our latest paper is out!

Gag proteins of endogenous retroviruses are required for zebrafish development

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Led heroically by Sylvia Chang & @jonowells.bsky.social

A study which has changed the way I think of #transposons! No less! 🧵 1/n

Chromatin loops are an ancestral hallmark of the animal regulatory genome - Nature The physical organization of the genome in non-bilaterian animals and their closest unicellular relatives is characterized; comparative analysis shows chromatin looping is a conserved feature of ...

I’m very excited to share our work on the early evolution of animal regulatory genome architecture - the main project of my postdoc, carried out across two wonderful and inspirational labs of @arnausebe.bsky.social and @mamartirenom.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🎉 This paper has been a long time and a labour of love (and hardship) for multiple group members, but, finally: we MPRA'ed 25k introgressed variants (Denisovan and Neanderthal) segregating at allele frequencies > 0.15 in humans today to evaluate their potential to regulate gene expression.

Massive experimental quantification allows interpretable deep learning of protein aggregation xAI trained on >100,000 random peptides predicts and elucidates primary sequence determinants of aggregation.

We quantify the aggregation of >100,000 random protein sequences to train CANYA, a convolution-attention hybrid neural network to predict aggregation from sequence. With @bennibolo.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Dissecting regulatory syntax in human development with scalable multiomics and deep learning Transcription factors (TFs) establish cell identity during development by binding regulatory DNA in a sequence-specific manner, often promoting local chromatin accessibility, and regulating gene expre...

Delighted to share our latest work deciphering the landscape of chromatin accessibility and modeling the DNA sequence syntax rules underlying gene regulation during human fetal development! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Read on for more: 🧵 1/16 #GeneReg 🧬🖥️

Programmatic design and editing of cis-regulatory elements The development of modern genome editing tools has enabled researchers to make such edits with high precision but has left unsolved the problem of designing these edits. As a solution, we propose Ledi...

Our preprint on designing and editing cis-regulatory elements using Ledidi is out! Ledidi turns *any* ML model (or set of models) into a designer of edits to DNA sequences that induce desired characteristics.

Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
GitHub: github.com/jmschrei/led...

One of the toughest parts of the field of massively parallel reporter assays to measure >~thousands of elements is that there are hundreds of pubs using them, but no central repo to easily locate the results....until now! Great collab w/ Jingjing Zhao, Ilias G-S, and @nadavahituv.bsky.social!!

Vidéos of the symposium are now available online @collegedefrance.bsky.social Just click and enjoy!🙏🏼🤘

I am elated to share that our manuscript describing Variant-EFFECTS, a high-throughput technology we developed to precisely and quantitatively measure the effects of CRISPR-mediated edits on gene expression, is now published at @cellpress.bsky.social: authors.elsevier.com/c/1kxgiL7PXu...

Low overlap of transcription factor DNA binding and regulatory targets - Nature A near-complete survey of transcription factor activities in Saccharomyces cerevisiae reveals that most transcription factors have both activator and repressor activities and limited overlap between t...

To the top of the "to-read" list. Looks like a heroic amount of work from the Hahn lab (large-scale ChEC-seq compendium!) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Join the UBC and SFU Postdocs for a social at the Bloedel Conservatory and Queen Elizabeth Park on Thursday 17th April!

4-5 PM - Bloedel Conservatory (Free Entry)

5 PM - BBQ at QE Park

Feel free to join for both parts of the event or just one.

Register now: ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

The importance of moving away from bulk! Occupancy of Pol II at promoters is dramatically different between fly and mouse cells! When looking single molecule! Proud of the team! @kasitc.bsky.social @molinalab.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s443...

Celebrating 10 years of our lab with a new preprint:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
How does enhancer location within a TAD control transcriptional bursts from a cognate promoter?
Experiments by Jana Tünnermann and modelling by Gregory Roth

Join us for the first edition of the Cascadia Advanced Genomic Technologies meeting! We aim at fostering collaborations to tackle critical challenges in mammalian genomics. Info and registration link below 👇

Join us June 19-20, 2025 in Vancouver BC for the Cascadia Advanced Genomic Technologies meeting! Featuring Keynote speaker Calin Plesa @calin.bsky.social Abstract deadline April 30🔔, but registration is capped so don't wait! 😱
de-boer-lab.github.io/CAGT_meeting/

3D dynamics of trans enhancer-promoter interactions in living Drosophila embryos reveals spatiotemporal thresholds for transcription activation While it is well acknowledged that specific enhancer-promoter interactions are essential for transcription, the spatiotemporal thresholds required for transcription initiation remain unclear. Here, we...

Cool preprint exploring the dynamics of transcriptional activation between homologous promoters in 🪰! Promoters are in physical proximity when simultaneously activated and a single active promoter produces more RNA. Competition for transcriptional resources between promoters? doi.org/10.1101/2025...

The link in the text works but not the rendering for some reason. genome.cshlp.org/content/35/3...

A though provocative read genome.cshlp.org/content/35/3.... While estrogen response triggers transcriptional and 3D chromatin changes, only a select few structural shifts are likely to subtly contribute to transcriptional regulation 🤔

In this study, Huang et al. demonstrate how a single enhancer independently controls the expression of two distal and functionally unrelated genes.

Learn more here:
➡️ tinyurl.com/gd352235