The spark of life. Initiating transcription in embryos.

Nadine Vastenhouw studies how the transcriptional machinery and chromatin template are brought together in time and space to robustly regulate transcription during development. After fertilization, animals go through cleavage divisions that transform the one-cell egg into a multicellular embryo. During this phase, the genome is inactive, and embryos rely on the products their mothers provided them. During the maternal to zygotic transition, developmental control is handed from maternally provided gene products to those synthesized from the zygotic genome. The onset of transcription is an excellent system to determine how all of the different variables that influence the decision to transcribe a gene or not come together to generate complex transcriptional programs. Nadine got her PhD from Utrecht University in the Netherlands for her work on transposon silencing and RNAi in the lab of Ronald Plasterk. After her postdoctoral work with Alex Schier at Harvard University, she established her own lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden in Germany. She and her lab have moved to the University of Lausanne in Switzerland in January 2021, where Nadine was appointed as a Professor. Nadine will talk about the recent work of her lab assessing the mechanism and function of nuclear organization in transcription regulation.