James Nuñez, Ph.D. – VAI Seminar Series

Editing the human epigenome with CRISPR

General approaches for heritably altering gene expression advances scientific discoveries and therapeutic efforts to manage and treat diseases. An emerging platform for gene perturbation is CRISPR epigenetic editing – technologies that enable locus-specific rewriting of DNA methylation and histone modifications. I will present our recent advances in developing new CRISPR epigenetic editing technologies, specifically our CRISPRoff platforms that program long-term gene silencing across thousands of human genes. Using CRISPRoff as a platform to follow the establishment of heterochromatin de novo in cells, I will present our unpublished data that link repressive histone marks and DNA methylation with RNA modifications to program epigenetic silencing of transposable elements. Our work advances technologies for site-specific editing of epigenetic modifications while opening biological insights into RNA-mediated establishment of epigenetic programs in human cells.

Speaker Information: 
James Nuñez, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, UC Berkeley

Host:
Mitchell Roth, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, Hong Li Laboratory

If you’d like to learn more about Dr. Nuñez and his research, please visit: https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/faculty/james-nunez