Thrilled to share my PhD work with @XiaoqiFeng_m @JohnInnesCentre is now published in @Nature 🌼🌿 You can read the open access paper here:

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RT @fncarelli: Hundreds of germline-specific Caenorhabditis promoters derived from ancestral and recent TE co-option events. If you missed….

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Nice write up of our recent work @JohnInnesCentre .

RT @Nature: Nature research paper: Histone H2B.8 compacts flowering plant sperm through chromatin phase separation

RT @XiaoqiFeng_m: How flowering plants compact their sperm? Our new paper published @Nature shows that a histone variant condenses plant sp….

Huge thanks to all co-authors (particularly Shengbo and Shaoli), our collaborators, my PhD supervisor @XiaoqiFeng_m and everyone at @JohnInnesCentre who make our work possible!.

14/ Our work has discovered a novel form of histone variant-mediated euchromatin aggregation by phase separation and nuclear condensation that is compatible with active transcription.

13/ Using genetics, we find that H2B.8 is required for normal fertility. As the transcriptome is unchanged, we speculate that flowering plant reproduction favours smaller nuclei that can reach the egg deeply embedded in maternal tissues.

12/ Despite the changes in nuclear architecture caused by H2B.8, we found no change in gene or TE expression. We show that the histone is removed from genes by transcription and therefore enables the normal sperm transcriptional program.

11/ H2B.8-enriched euchromatic TEs tend to be at the boundaries of pericentromeric heterochromatin. We suggest that H2B.8 aggregation could be causing heterochromatin foci to decondense.

10/ Using Hi-C we demonstrate that H2B.8 presence increases contacts along chromosome arms and between arms of different chromosomes whilst decondensing heterochromatin regions. Pairing with ChIP-seq, we show that H2B.8 is directly underlying these new contacts.

9/ So where does H2B.8 sit in the genome? We find it localises to euchromatic TEs and intergenic regions of the chromosome arms and is excluded from active genes.

8/ H2B.8 rescues the phenotype in sperm, but when the IDR is deleted we observe no complementation. This demonstrates that chromatin and nuclear compaction requires the phase separation ability of H2B.8.