Active Motif Podcasts

The Effects of Early Life Stress on Mammalian Development (Catherine J. Peña)

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Catherine Jensen Peña from Princeton University to talk about her work on early life stress and its effects on behavior.

The Peña lab focuses on how early life experiences are encoded and maintained into adulthood, with a long-lasting impact on behavior. Recent work shows that child maltreatment and other forms of early life stress increase the lifetime risk of depression and other mood, anxiety, and drug disorders by 2-4 fold. The Peña lab uses genome wide approaches to investigate key brain regions with a two-hit stress model.

Using RNA-Seq, the Peña Lab has shown that depression-like gene expression patterns are programmed by early life stress, similar to observations in mice exhibiting depression-like behavior after adult stress and are visible even before behavioral changes. Furthermore, latent and unique transcriptional responses to adult stress among a subset of genes is programmed by early life stress. The role of chromatin modifications in regulating these processes are investigated using state of the art technologies like Mod-Spec or ATAC-Seq.

ATAC-Seq, scATAC-Seq and Chromatin Dynamics in Single-Cells (Jason Buenrostro)

In this episode of the Active Motif Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Jason Buenrostro from Harvard University to talk about his work on developing biological tools to measure chromatin dynamics in single-cells.

We hear the story of how in his early years in the lab, Jason took a risk and added an enzyme called Transposase to cells in culture. What he saw on an agarose gel astonished him. He was able to recreate a nucleosomal ladder similar to using MNase or DNase-Seq, without the tedious steps of optimization. In following years he optimized the method into what is known today as ATAC-Seq. In recent years he was also able to bring ATAC-Seq to the next level, developing single cell ATAC-Seq (scATAC-Seq), and combining it with RNA-Seq in a multi-omics approach.

In this Episode we discuss how Jason Buenrostro developed ATAC-Seq in William Greenleaf's lab, how a lack of equipment shaped the ATAC-Seq protocol, and how scATAC-Seq has enabled a whole different way of looking at biological samples.

Chromatin Profiling: From ChIP to CUT&RUN, CUT&Tag and CUTAC (Steven Henikoff)

In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Dr. Steven Henikoff from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle to talk about the novel methods his lab has developed for profiling the chromatin landscape. By making use of enzyme tethering, the Henikoff lab has offered alternatives to ChIP which require less cells and take less time.