Search Our Scientific Publications & Authors

Sci Rep 2016 06 28;6:28616. Epub 2016 Jun 28.

Division of Theoretical Bioinformatics, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Im Neuenheimer Feld 280, Heidelberg, 69120, Germany.

Psychological stress during pregnancy increases the risk of childhood wheeze and asthma. However, the transmitting mechanisms remain largely unknown. Since epigenetic alterations have emerged as a link between perturbations in the prenatal environment and an increased disease risk we used whole genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) to analyze changes in DNA methylation in mothers and their children related to prenatal psychosocial stress and assessed its role in the development of wheeze in the child. Read More

Circ Res 2017 Nov 13;121(11):1237-1250. Epub 2017 Oct 13.

From the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, CA (M.-T.Z., N.-Y.S., N.M., J.L., S.L.Z., J.C.W.); Department of Cardiovascular Surgery of the Frist Affiliated Hospital, Institute for Cardiovascular Science, Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China (S.H.); Department of Chemical and Systems Biology, Stanford University School of Medicine, CA (R.S.); and Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, CA (F.J., M.P.S.).

Rationale: Regulatory DNA elements in the human genome play important roles in determining the transcriptional abundance and spatiotemporal gene expression during embryonic heart development and somatic cell reprogramming. It is not well known how chromatin marks in regulatory DNA elements are modulated to establish cell type-specific gene expression in the human heart.

Objective: We aimed to decipher the cell type-specific epigenetic signatures in regulatory DNA elements and how they modulate heart-specific gene expression. Read More

J Transl Med 2019 01 9;17(1):15. Epub 2019 Jan 9.

Servicio de Pediatría, Consorcio Hospital General Universitario de Valencia, 46014, Valencia, Spain.

Background: Early life is a period of drastic epigenetic remodeling in which the epigenome is especially sensitive to extrinsic and intrinsic influence. However, the epigenome-wide dynamics of the DNA methylation changes that occur during this period have not been sufficiently characterized in longitudinal studies.

Methods: To this end, we studied the DNA methylation status of more than 750,000 CpG sites using Illumina MethylationEPIC arrays on 33 paired blood samples from 11 subjects at birth and at 5 and 10 years of age, then characterized the chromatin context associated with these loci by integrating our data with histone, chromatin-state and enhancer-element external datasets, and, finally, validated our results through bisulfite pyrosequencing in two independent longitudinal cohorts of 18 additional subjects. Read More

Hum Reprod Update 2019 09;25(5):518-540

Reproductive Science Group, Faculty of Science, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia.

Background: A defining feature of sexual reproduction is the transmission of genomic information from both parents to the offspring. There is now compelling evidence that the inheritance of such genetic information is accompanied by additional epigenetic marks, or stable heritable information that is not accounted for by variations in DNA sequence. The reversible nature of epigenetic marks coupled with multiple rounds of epigenetic reprogramming that erase the majority of existing patterns have made the investigation of this phenomenon challenging. Read More