An intricate molecular machinery is at the core of gene expression regulation in every cell.
During the initial stages of organismal development, the coordinated activation of diverse …

Histone modifications and chromatin-associated protein complexes are crucially involved in
the control of gene expression, supervising cell fate decisions and differentiation. Many …

Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are derived from the inner cell mass (ICM) of the blastocyst.
ESCs have two distinctive properties: ability to proliferate indefinitely, a feature referred as …

Induced pluripotency is a powerful tool to derive patient-specific stem cells. In addition, it
provides a unique assay to study the interplay between transcription factors and chromatin …

Polycomb group (PcG) proteins are epigenetic modifiers involved in controlling gene
repression. Organized within multiprotein complexes, they regulate developmental genes in …

To unveil the still-elusive nature of metazoan replication origins, we identified them genome-
wide and at unprecedented high-resolution in mouse ES cells. This allowed initiation sites …

Newborn granule neurons generated from neural progenitor cells (NPCs) in the adult
hippocampus play a key role in spatial learning and pattern separation. However, the …

Differentiating somatic cells are progressively restricted to specialized functions during
ontogeny, but they can be experimentally directed to form other cell types, including those …

Retinal degeneration (RD) is one of the dominant causes of irreversible vision impairment
and blindness worldwide. However, the current effective therapeutics for RD in the …

OCT4 was discovered more than two decades ago as a transcription factor specific to early
embryonic development. Early studies with OCT4 were descriptive and looked at …