Geoff Faulkner

Loss of SETDB1-mediated H3K9me3 in human neural progenitor cells leads to transcriptional activation of L1 retrotransposons Abstract. Heterochromatin is characterized by an inaccessibility to the transcriptional machinery and is associated with the histone mark H3K9me3. However,

New paper from my lab out in NAR. We found that young L1 elements are controlled by SETDB1 and H3K9me3 in human neural progenitor cells via a mechanism independent of HUSH and TRIM28/KZNFs.

academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Interesting preprint from Moran lab showing an alternate L1 endonuclease activity

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

DOT1L provides transcriptional memory through PRC1.1 antagonism - Nature Cell Biology Neville, Ferguson et al. show that non-canonical Polycomb repressive complex 1.1-mediated gene silencing is antagonized by DOT1L and is required for the therapeutic efficacy of Menin and DOT1L inhibit...

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

happy i could be a part of this paper from the Gilan lab out now. Along with many other things, it provides strong evidence of chromatin memory for gene activation, and suggests that DOT1L is the missing link balancing the fast and slow arms of the MLL/Polycomb axis

New preprint from the lab! We dig into the regulatory roles of TEs in the mouse placenta, with some surprising findings. Led by the awesome @smamante.bsky.social. Particular kudos to him for navigating the many twists and turns of the project.

Nature retracts paper for data manipulation by Ph.D. student Nature has retracted a paper after an investigation at a U.K. institution found the first author — then a doctoral student — manipulated data.  The paper, which looked at the sensitivity of lu…

Nature has retracted a paper after an investigation at a U.K. institution found the first author — then a doctoral student — manipulated data.

Crick Spinout raises $32.5 million to progress immunotherapies targeting ‘Dark Antigens’ Enara Bio has announced $32.5 million in Series B financing to advance its pipeline of TCR-based immunotherapies against novel Dark Antigen targets for solid tumours.

Crick spinout Enara Bio, co-founded by group leader George Kassiotis, has raised $32.5 million to progress immunotherapies that target ‘Dark Antigens’, cancer-specific targets derived from genetic material that’s inactive in healthy cells

www.crick.ac.uk/news/2024-10...

Very happy that this part of my postdoc work is now out as a preprint!! Our findings reveal a new mechanism by which retroviral pandemics may have shaped primate brain evolution 🧬🐒🧠 This was a true team effort! w/ @ofeliakarlsson.bsky.social @raquelgarza.bsky.social @jakobssonlab.bsky.social #TEsky

Project Assistant The Department of Medical and Translational Biology at the Faculty of Medicine is now seeking a project assistant for a research project related to human brain aging. The position is full-time and lim

📣We are looking for a Project Assistant to join my group at the Wallenberg Center for Molecular Medicine at Umeå University. Join us if you are interested in transposable elements, epigenetics and human brain aging. 🧠🧬 Dont hesitate to reach out with any questions! 📣
umu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

Very excited to share my Phd/early post-doc work, out now in Cancer Research! Using multiomic data from multi-site tumors from ovarian cancer patients, we show that the tumors continue to acquire LINE-1 insertions after metastatic spread and find determinants of LINE-1 permissivity in this disease.

Half the Funding. Half the Future. - AAMRI The Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) was designed to deliver $1 billion each year in new, lifesaving funding for medical research. We know through financial modelling that the full amount can be re...

The Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) funds medical research in Australia. Only half the funds have been released. If you're an Australian and able to vote please use the form below to email your local MP to release the full amount of the MRFF
aamri.org.au/mrff/

Ha ha yes that is true. Here it is the same but a city/country divide on usage. And don't forget morning or afternoon tea actually means a snack with actual tea being optional!

Generating long deletions across the genome with pooled paired prime editing screens Engineered deletions are a powerful probe for studying genome architecture, function, and regulation. Yet, the lack of effective methods to create them in large numbers and at multi-kilobase scale has...

New 🧬✂️ pre-print! We show that paired prime editing can efficiently generate large deletions — even >1 Mb — with high precision and at scale. We use this to perform the first pooled prime deletion screen across the human genome.

🔗 biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A short thread (by Juliane Weller)👇

Auto-inhibition of PRC2 by the broadly expressed long isoform of AEBP2 | The EMBO Journal imageimageAEBP2 is an accessory subunit of the PRC2 complex previously implicated both in promoting and antagonizing Polycomb repressive activity. This study reveals that its alternative isoforms, AEB...

1/ It's long been assumed that AEBP2 recruit PRC2 to chromatin. Now, we show that AEBP2 usually does the exact opposite:
The only isoform of AEBP2 that is expressed in most cell types and tissues inhibits the chromatin-binding activity of PRC2. www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Congrats Vivien !

For obvious reasons, I've become fascinated with retrotransposons. So we ( @alexwhiteley.bsky.social and I) wrote an article now out in Neuron @cellpress.bsky.social on how we think retrotransposons influence brain function and health! kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...

We are recuiting two new Associate Professors here in Oxford Biochemistry. Come join us! Reach out to me if you have any questions. Please repost! tinyurl.com/mr3m7bd3

We're now recruiting early career group leaders at the Crick to lead ambitious research programmes and explore bold scientific questions.

Hear our Director, Edith Heard, explain why the Crick is a unique place for curiosity-driven research.

Apply now ➡️ www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...

Deep Intronic SVA_E Insertion Identified as the Most Common Pathogenic Variant Associated With Canavan Disease | Neurology Genetics Background and ObjectivesCanavan disease (CD) is a neurodegenerative disorder in which biallelic pathogenic variants in ASPA result in spongiform degeneration of the cerebral white matter, leading to ...

Another neurodegenerative disease caused by an SVA insertion. Not intron retention as seen in XPD, but aberrant splicing.

Very interesting! It seems like there's a lot of these pathogenic SVAs out there that have been overlooked for various reasons.

Congrats Marco!

Our study on the role of LTR5HS and SVAs in regulation of human neural crest migration is now published as peer-reviewed paper on @molsystbiol.org!
Congrats to first author brilliant postdoc Laura Deelen, and all the authors involved! @imperialsci.bsky.social
www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Reawakening retrotransposons: immune modulation in normal and malignant hematopoiesis Retrotransposons are mobile repetitive elements that constitute around 43% of the human genome. Normally silenced through epigenetic mechanisms, retrotransposons can become reactivated in response to ...

Our new review is out in Trends in Cancer. We had fund writing this :) We discuss the roles of retrotransposons in immune modulation in normal and malignant
hematopoiesis. www.cell.com/trends/cance...

Applications are now open! We are recruiting 20 Assistant Professors in a wide range of subject areas. We're looking for early-career researchers with strong scientific merits and future potential.
🔗 All positions: ki.se/en/about-ki/...

LINE-1 retrotransposons mediate cis-acting transcriptional control in human pluripotent stem cells and regulate early brain development Adami et al. demonstrate that evolutionarily young L1s are expressed in human pluripotent stem cells and are dynamically regulated throughout neural differentiation. The study examines the role of L1s...

New paper from our lab! We found that LINE-1 transposons contribute to early human brain development.

Funded by @asapresearch.parkinsonsroadmap.org

www.cell.com/cell-genomic...

ADAR1 as a Placental Innate Immune Rheostat Sustaining the Homeostatic Balance of Intrinsic Interferon Response at the Maternal‐Fetal Interface This study reveals that ADAR1, an RNA-editing enzyme, fine-tunes immune responses in the placenta by preventing the accumulation of immunogenic double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) from interferon-stimulate...

New paper from Bin Cao, showing that placenta-specific KO of ADAR1 is embryonic lethal.

This preprint is now a published peer-reviewed paper! Thanks to all the co-authors involved, to the funders and to @reviewcommons.org and @embopress.org @emboreports.org for a smooth editorial process! Excited to see this in press! www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

@imperiallifesci.bsky.social

Scatterplot showing fitness effect of ~7000 synonymous mutations in yeast: read count at start vs log2 fold change. Most data points are not significant but 204 points are significant outliers, either advantageous or deleterious.

At the same time, we made thousands of synonymous mutations in endogenous yeast genes and measured their growth. We used careful statistics and controls. Only 3%, 204 of 6874, had a fitness effect! This goes against a controversial recent result that most synonymous mutations had fitness effects.

UHRF2 mediates resistance to DNA methylation reprogramming in primordial germ cells - Nature Communications DNA methylation in mouse primordial germ cells (PGCs) is restricted to transposable elements, but how this unique DNA methylome is established is poorly understood. Here, the authors identify UHRF2 as...

I believe that over the past ~ two decades, since the breakthrough papers on UHRF1, this is the first reported DNA methylation phenotype of its close paralog, UHRF2 (and not for lack of trying). Congrats to Ambre Bender and Michael Weber on this fantastic study! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks for visiting!

last call!
submit your abstract by tonight to be selected for one of the many oral presentations at the leading European Transposon Meeting. We are very much looking forward to your contribution and attendance!