In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Dirk Schübeler, Director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) in Basel, Switzerland, to talk about his work on the effects of DNA methylation on chromatin structure and transcription.
 
Dirk Schübeler was born in Germany and started his scientific career in Braunschweig, Germany. After his postdoc at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, he joined the FMI in 2003 and never left. He was recently appointed as the Director of the FMI in March 2020.
 
Dirk Schübeler’s research focuses on DNA methylation and its effects on chromatin and transcription. It is widely known that DNA methylation leads to gene silencing, but many of the mechanisms and regulatory factors involved in this process remain understudied. Therefore, Dirk Schübeler and his team set out to characterize the DNA methylation profiles in normal human somatic cells and compare them with the methylation profiles in transformed human cells. More recent work in his lab led by postdoc Tuncay Baubec focused on factors that bind to methylated DNA regions and modify chromatin structure. The factors they studied include the MBD protein family and also proteins like DNMT3B.
 
In this interview, we discuss the impact of DNA methylation on chromatin states, how CpG-binding factors influence those processes, and we also talk about his new role as Director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute.
 
References
Tuncay Baubec, Daniele F. Colombo, … Dirk Schübeler (2015) Genomic profiling of DNA methyltransferases reveals a role for DNMT3B in genic methylation (Nature) DOI: 10.1038/nature14176 
Paul Adrian Ginno, Lukas Burger, … Dirk Schübeler (2018) Cell cycle-resolved chromatin proteomics reveals the extent of mitotic preservation of the genomic regulatory landscape (Nature Communications) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06007-5 
Michael B. Stadler, Rabih Murr, … Dirk Schübeler (2011) DNA-binding factors shape the mouse methylome at distal regulatory regions (Nature) DOI: 10.1038/nature10716 
Silvia Domcke, Anaïs Flore Bardet, … Dirk Schübeler (2015) Competition between DNA methylation and transcription factors determines binding of NRF1 (Nature) DOI: 10.1038/nature16462 
Florian Lienert, Christiane Wirbelauer, … Dirk Schübeler (2011) Identification of genetic elements that autonomously determine DNA methylation states (Nature Genetics) DOI: 10.1038/ng.946

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