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Bart Deplancke

@bartdeplancke.bsky.social
1.9K followers 274 following 50 posts

Professor in Systems Biology & Genetics @EPFL, opinions my own; Single Cell Omics / Gene Regulation / Transcription Factor / Stem Cells / Regulatory Variation / ML / Imaging / Adipose Biology / Microfluidics www.epfl.ch/labs/deplanckelab

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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Excited to announce the EPFL Latsis Symposium 2026: Decoding the Cell: Modeling, Predicting, and Engineering Cellular States 📅 Oct 29–30, 2026 📍 Olympic Museum, Lausanne 🇨🇭 Registration: latsis2026.epfl.ch/event/1/ #SingleCell #SystemsBiology #SyntheticBiology #AI #Multiomics #CellEngineering
latsis2026.epfl.ch
EPFL Latsis Symposium 2026
Join us in Lausanne to connect with the global community shaping the future of cell understanding and engineering.
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
This preprint closes a long development phase… but opens a new frontier: morphology as a quantitative, molecularly anchored measurement modality. If this resonates with your work, we’d love to connect. Thanks again to the entire team and looking forward to exciting new IRIS adventures 🚀!
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
IRIS also revealed that subtle nuclear morphologies correspond to distinct molecular states, including the previously puzzling T cell stripy nuclear phenotype (collab. w/ @BerendSnijder's lab; Hale et al., Science, 2024), now shown to map to a specific transcriptomic program.
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
We also show that IRIS enables prediction of transcriptomes directly from images (#ML). Models trained on IRIS data recover gene-level variation, cell-cycle phase, and cell identity from morphology alone.
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
We uncovered phase-specific TF activity, revealing how DREAM complex repression, FUCCI intensity, and cell-cycle speed are linked. IRIS detects quiescence-primed vs fully quiescent states & shows that slowly cycling cells display stronger DREAM-mediated repression, insights missed by RNA-only tools.
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
As a 1st application, we used IRIS to profile >5k FUCCI-3T3 cells, reconstructing the full continuous #cell-cycle from morphology + RNA; identifying 670 cycling genes. IRIS’s morphology-anchored cell-cycle angle aligns with Seurat/Tricycle but provides smoother, higher-resolution structure.
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
IRIS solves a long-standing gap: #imaging and droplet-based sequencing were never truly connected at single-cell resolution. Here, every cell is imaged first (BF + 4 fluorescent channels) → then deterministically barcoded → then sequenced, enabling single cell #phenomics.
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
We just released IRIS (7+yrs project), a tech we believe will transform cell biology by pairing high-resolution cell images with matched #scRNAseq, letting us interpret cellular form by its molecular ground truth. Huge tx to @JohannesBues, @JoernPezoldt, @CamilleLambert et al. shorturl.at/zgY8Z
Overview of Integrated Robotic Imaging and Sequencing, IRIS
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Reposted by Bart Deplancke
Dmitry Penzar @pensarata.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
(1/13) Excited to share the outcome of the IBIS Challenge! The IBIS challenge united dozens of teams across the world in tackling the problem of modeling transcription factor (TF) binding specificity using a diverse collection of experimental datasets for understudied human TFs.
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
🧵2/ Across 384 TFs and ~40,000 cells, we found: – Nonlinear, dose-sensitive reprogramming responses – TFs triggering different fates at low vs high dose – Same dose, different outcome = hidden complexity – TF pairs flipping between synergy & antagonism based on dose ratio
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
🧵1/ Excited to share our new paper introducing a new #singlecell assay: scTF-seq, a high-throughput single-cell approach to explore how transcription factor (TF) dose shapes cell identity and reprogramming outcomes. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Big congrats to the entire team @EPFL & @SIAT_China
nature.com
Dissecting the impact of transcription factor dose on cell reprogramming heterogeneity using scTF-seq - Nature Genetics
This study introduces single-cell transcription factor (TF) sequencing, a single-cell barcoded and doxycycline-inducible TF overexpression approach that reveals dose-sensitive functional classes of TFs and cellular heterogeneity by mapping TF dose-dependent transcriptomic changes during the reprogramming of mouse embryonic multipotent stromal cells.
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 06/08/2025
Outstanding Faculty opportunity in the broad area of 'life sciences engineering' @EPFL School of Life Sciences, open to both junior and senior researchers. We may prefer metabolism-centric applications but remain open to outstanding applications across domains: www.epfl.ch/about/workin...
epfl.ch
Faculty Position in Life Science Engineering
The School of Life Sciences at EPFL invites applications for a faculty position in life science engineering. Appointments will be at Tenure Track Assistant Professor or at Associate Professor level. W...
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
Fantastic work by Camille Lambert, Guido van Mierlo, Orane Guillaume-Gentil and Johannes Bues. For a related review on 'The evolution of DNA sequencing with microfluidics', pls also see: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
The evolution of DNA sequencing with microfluidics - Nature Reviews Genetics
The adoption of microfluidics was fundamental to the development of cost-effective, high-throughput DNA sequencing. As the field progresses towards multi-omics, Lambert et al. reflect on the key conce...
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
Our new review on how #microfluidics has been key for (#single-cell) #genomics & how it will remain essential to support this new era of single cell #phenomics: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... Great timing for the Microfluidics Gordon Research Conference here in Lucca! www.grc.org/physics-and-...
nature.com
Engineering next-generation microfluidic technologies for single-cell phenomics - Nature Genetics
Research is moving from a gene- and protein-centric view toward a holistic understanding of cellular phenotypes. This Review discusses the technological microfluidics challenges that must be addressed...
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
🚀 study: www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... from @larsplus.bsky.social et al: via enhancer design from scratch, 3 principles emerged: 1) TF binding strength = activation 'or' repression; 2) Same motif ≠ same output in all cell states; 3) 2 activators ≠ activation - combos can repress! #geneRegulation
cell.com
Design principles of cell-state-specific enhancers in hematopoiesis
Screen of minimalistic enhancers in blood progenitor cells demonstrates widespread dual activator-repressor function of transcription factors (TFs) and enables the model-guided design of cell-state-sp...
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 05/05/2025
Impressive, new snRNA-seq atlas across 8 mouse strains & tissues reveals how genetics shapes cell-type-specific gene expression. A key resource for decoding trait variation, disease mechanisms & guiding mouse model design. #Genomics #SingleCell #PrecisionMedicine. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 13/04/2025
Amazing 🚀 study w/ DNA seqFISH+, enabling mapping of 100,049 genomic loci, together with the nascent transcriptome for 17,856 genes, yielding unpredented insights into subnuclear structures in single cells www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Spatial multi-omics reveals cell-type-specific nuclear compartments - Nature
A genomic barcoding scheme called two-layer DNA seqFISH+ enables the simultaneous mapping of more than 100,000 loci and has been used to identify cell-type-specific subnuclear compartments in the mous...
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
Great opportunity! 🎆
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 06/04/2025
New tool 💪 from @steinaerts.bsky.social lab: CREsted, a DL-based approach for predicting cell type-specific reg. elements, applying it to many datasets, incl. mouse cortex, human PBMCs & glioblastoma, demonstrating its ability to identify key TF binding sites: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
CREsted: modeling genomic and synthetic cell type-specific enhancers across tissues and species
Sequence-based deep learning models have become the state of the art for the analysis of the genomic regulatory code. Particularly for transcriptional enhancers, deep learning models excel at decipher...
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Reposted by Bart Deplancke
Thomas Lemberger @tlemberger.bsky.social · 19/03/2025
Science under attack: a growing list of statements from journals @jama.com jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... @plos.org theplosblog.plos.org/2025/02/plos... @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41... @embopress.org www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
Sounds very exciting, very much looking forward!
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 28/02/2025
#scRNAseq to the next level: www.biorxiv.org/content/bior.... Mindbogglingly 100M cell large dataset involving 50 cancer cell lines and 1,100 molecule perturbations 🤩 — an absolute feast for the data-hungry ML/AI field, poised to advance cell understanding and modeling.
biorxiv.org
Tahoe-100M: A Giga-Scale Single-Cell Perturbation Atlas for Context-Dependent Gene Function and Cellular Modeling
Building predictive models of the cell requires systematically mapping how perturbations reshape each cell’s state, function, and behavior. Here, we present Tahoe-100M , a giga-scale single-cell atlas...
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
Really cool method 'Trace-n-seq' that allows for the molecular characterization of single neurons that innervate the pancreas and how this is altered in a cancer context at high resolution. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Characterization of single neurons reprogrammed by pancreatic cancer - Nature
Nature - Characterization of single neurons reprogrammed by pancreatic cancer
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
wow 🚀! Need to look into the details, but sounds really exciting: Seq-Scope-X --> new spatial transcriptomics & proteomics technology that achieves sub-200 nm super-resolution, surpassing the diffraction limit of optical microscopy by physically enlarging tissues. www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...
biorxiv.org
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 28/01/2025
👍
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
Happy to be part of the feed Erik, thanks for the initiative. scholar.google.ch/citations?us...
scholar.google.ch
Bart Deplancke
‪Professor in Systems Biology and Genetics at EPFL‬ - ‪‪Cited by 18,422‬‬ - ‪genetics‬ - ‪transcription‬ - ‪systems biology‬ - ‪single cell‬
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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 22/01/2025
A new mechanism for cancer-induced immune evasion. We knew about cancer cells hijacking mitochondria. Now we learn about how their mitochondrial transfer to T cells impairs the tumor immune response. www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/d41...
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
Interesting study showing how a heart disease-linked TF, TBX5, regulates 3D chromatin independently of transcription, via structural and cohesin-regulating roles in a dose-dependent fashion www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 11/01/2025
Not that I know of, but it is for sure a good idea. Someone simply needs to start it! 💪
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 11/01/2025
Cool new method (PERFF-seq) for profiling rare cell states via #scRNAseq, allowing for the isolation of rare cell populations by fluorescently labeling specific transcripts after which the respective cells are sorted, thus uncovering more phenotypic heterogeneity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Transcript-specific enrichment enables profiling of rare cell states via single-cell RNA sequencing - Nature Genetics
Programmable Enrichment via RNA FlowFISH by sequencing (PERFF-seq) isolates rare cells based on RNA marker transcripts for single-cell RNA sequencing profiling of complex tissues, with applicability t...
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 11/01/2025
Fully agree with Carlos! Having peers at a similar career stage has been invaluable—building lasting relationships, inspiring great science, and acting as soundboards for new ideas. These connections still help navigate the daily grind of being a PI. So excited to see the JEDI Phoenix rise again! 🚀✨
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 10/01/2025
Fantastic opportunity: 🚀 Calling early-career scientists! Apply for the 2025 ELISIR Scholar at EPFL. From outstanding PhD straight to group leader. Join an interdisciplinary research community to conduct independent research in any area of #lifesciences in Lausanne, CH 👉 go.epfl.ch/ELISIR
go.epfl.ch
EPFL Life Sciences Early Independent Research Scholar (ELISIR)
From exceptional PhD directly to independent group leader
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 06/01/2025
Interesting study showing that Bicoid clusters in fly embryos preserve nuclear concentration info, guiding gene expression despite non-linear LLPS models. These clusters also act as high-fidelity sensors, key for fast, precise transcriptional regulation. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
Transcription factor clusters as information transfer agents
Live imaging shows that regulatory protein clusters may aid fast and precise delivery of transcriptional information to gene loci.
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 06/01/2025
Superb work by Wouter @Zouters & @OlgaPushkarev developing ChromatinHD, two scale-adaptive #machinelearning models & interpretation tools that use #scRNAseq + #scATACseq data to better understand how chromatin accessibility relates to gene expression doi.org/10.1038/s414... Happy 2025 everyone 🎆 !
doi.org
ChromatinHD connects single-cell DNA accessibility and conformation to gene expression through scale-adaptive machine learning - Nature Communications
Functional chromatin changes occur at different scales. Here, the authors introduce ChromatinHD, a method that characterises differential and predictive chromatin accessibility changes in a scale-adap...
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 24/12/2024
Cool framework to systematically compare & evaluate methods that integrate scRNA+ATAC-seq data to infer GRNs, highlighting limitations & variability in performance across different tasks and clear challenge to capture causal relationships from perturbation assays www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...
biorxiv.org
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
Interesting study on the use of #scRNA-seq data for protein level prediction. It highlights the limitations of mRNA as a predictor of protein expression and the effectiveness of #machine-learning models in improving protein abundance estimations. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Machine Learning Predictions Surpass Individual mRNAs as a Proxy of Single-cell Protein Expression
Expansive repositories of single-cell RNA-seq data are now available for large-scale transcriptomics analysis at single-cell resolution. However, proteomics data are relatively limited in scale and se...
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
Judith's magnum opus from her postdoc in our lab: a genome-integrated massively parallel reporter assay for quantitative insights into enhancer-promoter communication, AI benchmarking, variant dissection, & promoter motif characterization. It will be the foundation of her new lab @USC, Jan 2025! 🚀
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FMI science @fmiscience.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
📣 Please share: We’re hiring a tenure-track Group Leader in Multicellular Systems to explore the molecular and cellular mechanisms driving the formation, maintenance, or destabilization of tissues, organs and organisms. Apply at: www.fmi.ch/education-ca...
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Lisa Sikkema @lisasikkema.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
1/7 Planning to build a single-cell atlas? Or wondering how atlases can be useful to your research? Read our guide on single-cell atlases www.nature.com/articles/s41... published in Nature Methods, by @lisasikkema.bsky.social, @khrovatin.bsky.social, Malte Luecken, @fabiantheis.bsky.social et al.
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 08/12/2024
Major milestone: Tabula Sapiens 2.0 maps tissue composition & TF expression in 175 cell types, identifying 745 ubiquitous & 890 cell type-specific TFs (many still uncharacterized -> #Codebook) w/ roles in tissue homeostasis, stress response & metabolism. #SingleCell www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Tabula Sapiens reveals transcription factor expression, senescence effects, and sex-specific features in cell types from 28 human organs and tissues
The Tabula Sapiens is a reference human cell atlas containing single cell transcriptomic data from more than two dozen organs and tissues. Here we report Tabula Sapiens 2.0 which includes data from ni...
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
A grand milestone in single cell drug screening!
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
A deep learning-based image analysis algorithm, MouseMapper, to enable comprehensive analysis of disease-associated changes at the whole-body scale, and applied to study nervous and immune systems in high-fat diet induced obesity. One word: wow!
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
Very much agree 👍. In fact, we will soon post a pre-print that goes in the same direction, leveraging a hybrid between endogenous and synthetic gene regulation, so very nice to see you are breaking new ground here!
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Really cool 'synthetic' approach to better understand the molecular mechanisms underlying endogenous (!) gene regulation, something that the field has so far been lacking!
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
Massive study to identify functional relationships between genes and understand how genetic background influences gene perturbation effects. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
A genome-scale single cell CRISPRi map of trans gene regulation across human pluripotent stem cell lines
Population-scale resources of genetic, molecular, and cellular information form the basis for understanding human genomes, charting the heritable basis of disease, and tracing the effects of mutations...
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
Huge effort resulting in improved TF binding site models. Congrats to the winners but also all participants for pushing analytical borders and finally also to Vanja Kulakovskiy @halfacrocodile.bsky.social‬ & team for organizing it all!
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
Interesting study showing that the incorporation of Med15 into Gcn4 condensates and the formation of soluble complexes with Med15 are better predictors of transcriptional activity than homotypic phase separation www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Reconciling competing models on the roles of condensates and soluble complexes in transcription factor function
Phase separation explains the exquisite spatial and temporal regulation of many biological processes, but the role of transcription factor–mediated condensates in gene regulation is contentious, requi...
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Reposted by Bart Deplancke
Dr. Julie Claycomb @farmgirlphd.bsky.social · 29/10/2024
Please share broadly! We (Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto) are looking for a new faculty member! Deadline Dec 19. Those working on model organisms and using genomics, computational and systems approaches are strongly encouraged to apply! Reach out w/ Qs! jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...
jobs.utoronto.ca
Assistant Professor - Molecular Biology and Genetics
Assistant Professor - Molecular Biology and Genetics
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Reposted by Bart Deplancke
The Lewis Lab @peterlewislab.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
How do cells remember transient signals? New work reveals that a transient pulse of histone deacetylase inhibition leaves a lasting mark on 3D genome architecture in mESCs, linking chromatin dynamics to cellular memory and gene expression robustness. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Bart Deplancke @bartdeplancke.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
I think we all do & those who claim otherwise I don't believe ;). As PIs, it's simply hard to keep up with many rapidly evolving fields at the same time, making us feel superficial. But it's also the beauty of being a scholar: we can learn from our own lab members and colleagues around us!
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