Our research focuses on developing single-cell and single-molecule imaging approaches to improve our understanding of stem cell renewal and differentiation.
In particular, we are interested in how chromatin binding proteins regulate genome architecture and gene expression during stem cell fate transitions and why they are often misregulated during early cancer progression. Single-cell approaches are key to understand how these proteins work due to the considerable cell heterogeneity that occurs during stem cell fate transitions.
In recent years, we have developed several biophysical and computational approaches to answer these questions. For example, we have established a method combining imaging and single-cell Hi-C to study genome architecture inside individual embryonic stem cells. To understand how proteins interact with each other and with chromatin, we have set up several in vitro and live-cell single-molecule imaging approaches capable of localising single proteins at <15 nm resolution.
We are continuing to develop novel single-cell and single-molecule imaging approaches but also using the techniques described above to gain insight into the role of key protein complexes involved in stem cell differentiation.
