[Note: starting time 10.30] Biophysical principles underlying chromosome organisation and transcription

I will describe two biophysical mechanisms underlying chromosome organisation which we and others have recently worked on. The first mechanism - the bridging-induced attraction - drives intranuclear phase separation (more precisely microphase separation) of DNA-binding proteins. The other mechanism - loop extrusion - is responsible for the formation of nonequilibrium chromosome loops.

I will also discuss some recent work we have done which aims to find the  functional role of microphase separation in transcription. Specifically I will show how our modelling can be used to study the dynamics of chromatin transcription, and to quantitatively predict the effect of 3D structure on transcriptional activity in human cells.