Events

Professor Juanma Vaquerizas from MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences – Imperial College London will open the HiLIFE Webinars this fall.  

Juanma (Spanish short form for ‘Juan Manuel’) studied Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the  Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. His group is interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms that regulate the three dimensional organisation of chromatin in the nucleus and how these function during development (see Hug et al., 2017) or are affected in disease (eg. Díaz, Kruse et al., 2018). Juanma received his PhD from the Spanish National Cancer Centre and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2008) where he worked on the characterisation of the human transcription factor repertoire (Vaquerizas et al., 2009). Juanma trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Nick Luscombe at the EMBL – European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK. Here, in collaboration with Asifa Akhtar’s laboratory he focused on the study of the dosage compensation mechanism in Drosophila melanogaster (Kind, Vaquerizas et al., 2008; Vaquerizas, Suyama, Kind et al., 2010). Juanma started as a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the MPI in Muenster in 2012, and was awarded Academy of Medical Sciences Professorship starting in 2021 at MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences – Imperial College London. 

Recent publications:  

Chang NC, Rovira Q, Wells JN, Feschotte C, Vaquerizas JM. Zebrafish transposable elements show extensive diversification in age, genomic distribution, and developmental expression. Genome Res. 2022 Jan 5:gr.275655.121. doi: 10.1101/gr.275655.121. 

Ing-Simmons E, Rigau M, Vaquerizas JM. Emerging mechanisms and dynamics of three-dimensional genome organisation at zygotic genome activation. Curr Opin Cell Biol. 2022 Jan 19;74:37-46. doi: 10.1016/j.ceb.2021.12.004. 

Ing-Simmons E, Vaid R, Bing XY, Levine M, Mannervik M, Vaquerizas JM. (2021). Independence of chromatin conformation and gene regulation during Drosophila dorsoventral patterning. Nature Genetics 53(4):487-499. doi: 10.1038/s41588-021-00799-x. PMID: 33795866; PMCID: PMC8035076.

 

Rhodes JDP, Feldman A, Hernandez-Rodriguez B, Diaz N, Brown JM, Fursova NA, Blackledge NP, Prathapan P, Dobrinic P, Huseyin MK, Szczurek A, Kruse K, Nasymth KA, Buckle VJ, Vaquerizas JM, Klose RJ. (2020). Cohesin disrupts Polycomb-dependent chromosome interactions in embryonic stem cells. Cell Reports, doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.12.057.

 

Galan S, Machnik N, Kruse K, Díaz N, Marti-Renom MA, Vaquerizas JM. (2020). CHESS enables quantitative comparison of chromatin contact data and automatic feature extraction. Nature Genetics 52(11):1247-1255. doi: 10.1038/s41588-020-00712-y.  PMID: 33077914; PMCID: PMC7610641.