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Seminar

Wednesday, June 21st, 2023
11h30
Centre de recherche - Paris - Amphithéâtre Marie Curie

Learning the statistical folding of bacterial chromosomes

The physical organization of bacterial chromosomes is inherently variable, with large conformational fluctuations both from cell to cell and over time. Yet, chromosomes must also be structured to facilitate processes such as transcription, replication, and segregation. A physical description of this dynamic statistical folding of bacterial chromosomes remains largely elusive.  In this talk, I will present a fully data-driven maximum entropy approach we developed to extract single-cell 3D chromosome conformations from Hi-C experiments on the model organism Caulobacter crescentus. The predictive power of our model is validated by independent experiments. On large genomic scales, organizational features are predominantly present along the long cell axis: chromosomal loci exhibit striking long-ranged two-point axial correlations, indicating emergent order. This organization is associated with large genomic clusters we term Super Domains (SuDs), whose existence we support with super-resolution microscopy. On smaller genomic scales, our model reveals chromosome extensions that correlate with transcriptional and loop extrusion activity. Finally, I will discuss preliminary results to generalize our data-driven theoretical approach to describe the dynamic statistical organization of chromosomes that are undergoing replication and segregation.

Speaker(s)

M. Chase Broedersz 

VU Amsterdam and LMU Munich

Hosted by


PCC Seminar Team

Invited by

Antoine Coulon

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