Ben Sabari

This is an excellent environment for scientists aiming to build an independent research program grounded in rigor and conceptual clarity. Please email me your CV and a brief statement of interests.

The lab is funded and growing, with multiple projects addressing fundamental and disease-relevant questions. This position is well suited for someone who values mechanistic over descriptive science and wants to help shape an emerging field.

Strong training in molecular biology or biochemistry and a solid publication record are essential. Experience with engineering mammalian cell lines, functional genomics, protein biochemistry, and/or quantitative fluorescence microscopy is a plus.

I am recruiting postdoctoral fellows to develop new research directions in the lab. We study transcriptional regulation through biomolecular condensates in development and disease, with an emphasis on first-principles and mechanistic discovery. Please repost or share with colleagues.

Activator-promoter compatibility in mammals: a CpG-Island-specific co-activator directly bridges transcription factors to TFIID Transcription from CpG island (CGI) promoters controls the expression of two-thirds of mammalian genes, yet despite their prevalence, it remains unknown whether CGI-specific co-activators with intrins...

Activator-promoter compatibility in mammals - Hcfc1 is a key and intrinsically CGI-promoter-specific co-activator that cannot activate non-CGI promoters. Lead by @nemcko.bsky.social & Kevin Sabath in collab. with @plaschkalab.bsky.social @impvienna.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (1/2)

Do transcriptional activators work on any promoter? Our data says no. 🙅‍♂️
Despite driving ~2/3 of mammalian genes, CpG island (CGI) promoters have remained a puzzle. We identified >50 activators that are exclusively compatible with this promoter class. 🧬

Differential conformational expansion of NUP98-HOXA9 oncoprotein from nanosized assemblies to macrophases - Nature Communications Some transcription factors can organize into different structural states, from small nanoscale clusters to macrophases. Here authors show that NHA9 undergoes differential conformational expansion acro...

🎉Publication alert🎉
Congratulations to @lemkelab.bsky.social, @wittmann-lab.bsky.social, Girard Lab & their teams on their new Nature Communications publication. This work showcases the active cross-disciplinary dialogue that lies at the heart of our network. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multiscale structure of chromatin condensates explains phase separation and material properties The structure and interaction networks of molecules within biomolecular condensates are poorly understood. Using cryo–electron tomography and molecular dynamics simulations, we elucidated the structur...

@science.org 🧬🔬 Multiscale structure of #chromatin condensates explains phase separation and material properties | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @janhuemar.bsky.social et al.

Our Science paper is out!

Huge congratulations to @huabin-zhou.bsky.social, Mike Rosen, and the brilliant @janhuemar.bsky.social @juliamaristany.bsky.social and @kieran-russell.bsky.social from our group

News: bit.ly/4avnkAr and bit.ly/3XBGVHS

Great perspective by @vram142.bsky.social +K Zhang

Love this; inspired by early experiences and cemented by the incomparable @jiwasa.bsky.social at an incredible workshop she and @theroglab.bsky.social organized in '22, I've become thoroughly convinced that - at least for me - developing figures from scratch is a key part of scientific inquiry.

Anthony A. Hyman will become EMBL’s next Director General.

He joins EMBL from @mpi-cbg.de in Dresden. He is also Professor of Molecular Biology @tudresden.bsky.social, and was a group leader at EMBL Heidelberg from 1993 to 1999.

www.embl.org/news/people-...

6 years ago, Lizz took a leap of faith by moving across the country to join our new and empty lab as a research tech. She then became our 1st grad student, playing a major role in shaping our research directions and lab culture. Today she defended her PhD, and I couldn’t be more proud.

Congrats, Josh! Exciting work!

(1/10) How do diverse leukemia mutations converge on the same molecular program? In #RibackLab first manuscript @cp-cell.bsky.social, collaboration with @goodell-lab.bsky.social shows that disparate mutations rewire shared protein networks to form nuclear condensates called C-bodies.

Evidence for improved DNA repair in long-lived bowhead whale - Nature Analysis of the longest-lived mammal, the bowhead whale, reveals an improved ability to repair DNA breaks, mediated by high levels of cold-inducible RNA-binding protein.  &nbs...

What do the naked mole rat and bowhead whale (lives to ~200 years) have in common to explain their remarkable longevity?
Enhanced DNA repair
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
erictopol.substack.com/p/a-long-awa...

Thanks Krishna!

Big thank you to Hue Sun Chan, @jonaswessen.bsky.social, Nancy De La Cruz, and @heankel.bsky.social for making this wonderful interdisciplinary collaboration a success.

This is all part of a bigger story related to the IDR "specificity code" and the IDR sequence-function relationship, and provides compelling evidence that specificity can be encoded within the chemical patterns of amino acids and the multivalent networks they enable.

Functional partitioning of transcriptional regulators by patterned charge blocks Charge patterning in disordered regions of transcriptional regulators mediates selective partitioning into MED1IDR condensates for gene activation.

This work builds off of my lab's 2023 paper that demonstrated selective and functional partitioning of positive regulators of transcription by patterened charge blocks
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

As the model only accounts for multivalent interactions among polymers, the accuracy of its predictions demonstrates that specificity can arise directly from multivalent contacts among disordered regions without needing to invoke ordered-structure-mediated interactions

Sequence-based prediction of condensate composition reveals that specificity can emerge from multivalent interactions among disordered regions - Communications Chemistry Condensates composed of the disordered region of the mediator of RNA polymerase II transcription subunit 1 (MED1) are known to partition specific proteins, but whether this specificity arises from ord...

In collaboration with Hue Sun Chan and @jonaswessen.bsky.social, we present a polymer theory for sequence-based prediction of selective partitioning of charged IDRs. This method correctly predicted the partitioning of IDRs for which we had no experimental data. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Happy to share our latest in @natcomputsci.nature.com
led by (amazing) Ryan Krueger + colab w M. Brenner!

We introduce a framework to directly design intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) from physics-based simulations.
🧬 doi.org/10.1038/s435...
📰 www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/news/article...

Congrats, David!

Congratulations! Well deserved!

Lab picture of Holehouse lab members past and present

Last week, Washington University made the perhaps questionable decision to award me tenure.

Preprint!

Inspired by condensates that form on specific DNA, we ask:

can we design multicomponent fluids to form distinct condensates on diff. surfaces?

i.e. perform classification by condensation ⚛️ 💻 exploiting phase transitions beyond compartmentalization!
arxiv.org/abs/2509.08100
(1/2)

Congratulations to the Fritz Lipmann Lecturer Michael Rosen (Dallas) by the GBM president Harald Kolmar.

Major Medical Prizes Given to Cell Biology and Cystic Fibrosis Pioneers

Major Medical Prizes Given to Cell Biology and Cystic Fibrosis Pioneers www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/h...

New in @pnas.org with @gladfelterlab.bsky.social @sneadlab.bsky.social ! 📢

Cells use condensates (dynamic compartments without membranes) to organize key reactions. Some condensates have core & shell layers… but how do such layers form? 🤔

👉 pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2504778122 (1/6)