Altering DNA packaging to regulate gene transcription

Oliver Hendy, a PhD student in the lab of Alex Stark at the IMP, is in the last stages of his doctoral studies. For his thesis, he studied how a group of proteins called ‘chromatin remodelers’ change the way DNA is packaged, and how this modulates gene transcription in fruit fly cells. In his latest work, now published in the journal Molecular Cell, he found that two major sets of genes require the help of distinct chromatin remodelers to be transcribed.