Elena Dvoretskova

I’m thrilled to share that my PhD work has been just published in Cell. After a long and bumpy ride, we uncovered the core function of nuclear speckles -splicing of GC-levelled exons- and traced the evolution of this gene architecture and condensates themselves to amniotes.

We wrote a perspective "How to build the regulatory genome: a constructionist guide to the cis-regulatory code", out in Development yesterday. Title says it all. Find it here:

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

📢 Hiring! Our group @ncmbm.bsky.social seeks a Research Scientist contributing to:
• Reproducible pipelines for large-scale genomics
• cisreg signature analysis in breast cancer
• Continued development of JASPAR
• Cross-disciplinary collaboration

Apply now 👉
www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

CellRank protocol now in @NatureProtocols! 🎉

@PhilippWeiler's detailed guide shows how to:
- Integrate velocity, pseudotime & time points
- Infer cell fate probabilities
- Analyze lineage priming at scale

Great complement to our CellRank 2 paper!

📖 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Advancing regulatory variant effect prediction with AlphaGenome - Nature AlphaGenome, a deep learning model that inputs 1-Mb DNA sequence to predict functional genomic tracks at single-base resolution across diverse modalities, outperforms existing models in variant effect...

I had intended to post something about this new Google DeepMind paper that appeared yesterday in Nature, but the press coverage has added to what there is to say. So this is a long 🧵
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I've started my own lab 🎉
PhD/postdoc positions available - reach out if curious about cerebellum evo-devo and autism spectrum disorders.

We’re based at Uni Tartu, Institute of Genomics (home to Estonian Biobank), and funded by @simonsfoundation.org @embo.org, and the Estonian Research Council.

We are thrilled that our study on the evolution of gene regulation in mammalian cerebellum development – led by @ioansarr.bsky.social, @marisepp.bsky.social and @tyamadat.bsky.social, in collaboration with @steinaerts.bsky.social – is now out in @ScienceMagazine! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Dissecting gene regulatory networks governing human cortical cell fate - Nature Systematic screening of transcription factors reveals conserved mechanisms governing cortical radial glia lineage progression across primates and provides a framework for functional dissecti...

1/ Our new study, led by Jingwen Ding, examines the role of transcription factors during human neurogenesis to identify gene regulatory networks influencing cell fate, maturation, and subtype specification
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Journals explaining why it takes 9 months to send back reviews

New preprint on technologies to scale up CRISPR screens.

We use them to map 665,856 pairwise genetic perturbations and outline a path to comprehensive interaction mapping in human cells.

We also introduce an approach for cloning lentiviral libraries with billions of elements.

A competition model of multilineage priming and cell-fate decisions In development, cells navigate highly complex gene-regulatory landscapes to make fate choices. Steinschaden et al. synthesize concepts of multilineage priming, microheterogeneity, and collective multi...

Our review “A competition model of multilineage priming and cell-fate decisions” is out: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

A genetically encoded device for transcriptome storage in mammalian cells Understanding how cells make decisions over time requires the ability to link past molecular states to future phenotypic outcomes. We present TimeVault, a genetically encoded system that records and s...

🧬🔬@science.org A genetically encoded device for #transcriptome storage in mammalian cells | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @broadinstitute.org

TF-MINDI is out! A new method to learn cis-regulatory codes through rich embeddings of TF binding sites. TF-MINDI decomposes motif neighbourhoods, and works downstream of any sequence-to-function deep learning model. We deeply study the enhancer code in human neural development, check out the thread

rdcu.be/eX8JD

DRN new publication alert:

Manning et al., 2025, @emmanning.bsky.social, co-led by Marysia Placzek and Elsie Place @elsieplace.bsky.social, in collaboration with Seth Blackshaw @sethblackshaw.bsky.social

An expanded registry of candidate cis-regulatory elements - Nature The existing ENCODE registry of candidate human and mouse cis-regulatory elements is expanded with the addition of new ENCODE data, integrating new functional data as well as new cell and tissue types...

Our paper on the newest version of the Registry of candidate cis-Regulatory Elements (cCREs) is out 🧬

Huge thanks to the many collaborators, experimentalists, analysts and software developers who made this work possible — truly a team effort!

A "meme-torial" of the science is coming soon 👀

Self-organized or instructed?

My @natrevgenet.nature.com Journal Club traces how classic papers revealed two modes of developmental patterning & why the debate between Turing and Wolpert is as timely as ever for organoid engineering today

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The transcription of a single olfactory receptor per neuron is enforced by epigenetic silencing of their enhancers The ability to discriminate thousands of odors in our environment requires each olfactory neuron to express a single olfactory receptor from hundreds of available genes. The biochemical mechanism enfo...

This went under the radar but answers a fundamental question in Epigenetics...

From many hundreds of olfactory receptor genes, each neuron selects expression of only single one (near-randomly). How?

Outstanding work from Mathieu Boulard and colleagues

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

As usual this time of year, started drafting the list of gene regulation conferences for 2026, enjoy! generegulation.org/conferences-...
Know of a relevant event that’s missing? Please reply below

Join @stirlingchurchman.bsky.social,
@moffittlab.bsky.social, @saramostafavi.bsky.social, me and all speakers for the 2026 CSHL meeting Systems Biology: Global Regulation of Gene Expression, March 11-14. Abstract deadline January 9! More infos and registration at meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.asp...

An integrated view of the structure and function of the human 4D nucleome - Nature The 4D Nucleome Project demonstrates the use of genomic assays and computational methods to measure genome folding and then predict genomic structure from DNA sequence, facilitatin...

A major output of the 4D Nucleome project appeared today. This is the joint effort of many scientists working together and (publicly) sharing data and results for several years. We hope this is of interest to many genome biologists!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Can one map the genome-wide binding (1) and its protein partners (2) simultaneously from the same sample?

Yes, one can. with CUT&ID ✂️🪪

Spearheaded — singlehandedly — by @annanordin.bsky.social

No need of transgenesis, cloning and overexpression.

Check it out, it's fast and its works.

Reconstructing Waddington’s landscape from data | PNAS The development of a zygote into a functional organism requires that this single progenitor cell gives rise to numerous distinct cell types. Attemp...

Great to see this published: Fitting dynamical landscape models to single-cell data, creating interpretable maps of cell decision making & developmental logic

Applied to neural tube patterning, we show how morphogen signals reshape landscapes and drive fate decisions

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

📣 I hereby make my Bluesky debut to announce that our work linking DNA binding affinities and kinetics 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘪𝘵𝘳𝘰 and 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘪𝘷𝘰 for the human transcription factor KLF1 just got published in Cell! @cp-cell.bsky.social

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Key findings in a thread (1/6):

Application to speak in the Fragile Nucleosome series Thank you for your interest in our seminar series! We use a variety of different session formats but, in general, trainees can plan for a ~15 min talk + 5min Q/A and PIs can plan for a ~25min talk +...

Do you have an exciting new chromatin/transcription story that you'd like to share with the #FN community?

Fill out this form to be considered for a talk in our Jan-June 2026 schedule! forms.gle/TBi38UgYxPAB...

Please repost and share!

New paper “Proteome-wide model for human disease genetics” is now live at Nature Genetics: rdcu.be/eRu7K
popEVE (pop.evemodel.org) finds the needles in the haystacks of human genetic variation:

Fun week for DNA methylation research! Here is a thread of three cool papers that came out, all with an evolution angle. And a bonus 4th that examines DNAme/PcG interplay (certainly an interest for our lab!) #Epigenetics

The cis-regulatory logic integrating spatial and temporal patterning in the vertebrate neural tube Zhang et al. identify a global temporal chromatin program that operates across the developing vertebrate nervous system to control neural cell diversity. This mechanism, which involves Nr6a1 and NFIA/...

Good to see the peer reviewed version of this in print

The cis-regulatory logic integrating spatial and temporal patterning in the vertebrate neural tube

A global temporal chromatin program operates across the vertebrate nervous system to control neural cell diversity

www.cell.com/developmenta...

Our latest paper has just been published in Cell!

doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

We developed a new method called MCC ultra, which allows 3D chromatin structure to be visualised with a 1 base pair pixel size.

🚀 Our new Science paper is out (w/ B DeMeo, D Burkhardt, A Shalek, M Cortes): www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
We show that active learning + transcriptomic perturbations can guide which exps to run next, boosting phenotypic hit rates >13x. AI not just predicting bio, but designing it. 🔁