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In a recently filmed two-part lecture, IMP scientific director Jan-Michael Peters elaborates on how Cohesin and CTCF fold DNA in mammalian genomes. The video, produced by the life science education initiative iBiology, has now been made available.

Chromatin organisation has been an important research interest at the IMP ever since Kim Nasmyth’s lab described the role of Cohesin in cell division in 1997. Today, the lab of IMP scientific director Jan-Michael Peters is among the leading groups in the wide field of mitosis and chromosome biology, focussing on mechanisms that underlie chromatid cohesion. 

In a two-part lecture given for the life science education initiative iBiology, Jan-Michael Peters shows that cohesin may have roles beyond facilitating sister chromatin cohesion. Cohesin co-localises on chromosomes with a DNA binding protein called CTCF, which regulates transcription by forming DNA loops. This hints at a role for cohesin and CTCF in folding DNA into loops to allow efficient packing of very large eukaryotic genomes into small cell nuclei and regulating functions such as gene expression. Jan-Michael Peters concludes the talk in describing how DNA could be extruded by cohesin to form a loop, and how the boundaries of the loop are determined by CTCF.