Probing Kilobase-scale Chromatin Architecture and its Regulation

Event Details

Type

Monday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Viviana Risca, Ph.D., assistant professor and head, Laboratory of Genome Architecture and Dynamics, The Rockefeller University

Speaker bio(s)

The kilobase-scale linear structure and folding of chromatin have been implicated in the control of most DNA-based processes in eukaryotic cells, including transcription and the maintenance of genome integrity. Probing this level of chromatin architecture has been an ongoing challenge because most available technologies are plagued by fixation artifacts, enzymatic biases, or perturbation of the weak interactions that are thought to organize chromatin upon cell permeabilization or dissociation. The Risca lab has developed a suite of complementary assays based on ionizing radiation damage and proximity ligation that address these challenges and have integrated them with coarse-grained modeling. Dr. Risca will describe how the lab is applying these approaches to understand how histone acetylation and linker histone density affect chromatin folding, how they are helping to analyze the chromatin organization of the HBV viral genome as it infects human cells, and several highlights of other ongoing projects in the Risca lab.

Viviana I. Risca received her bachelor’s degree in physics from Stanford, where she worked with Steven Block. She did her doctoral work in biophysics at UC Berkeley with Dan Fletcher, and her postdoctoral research in the lab of Will Greenleaf (with co-advisor Aaron Straight) at Stanford. Risca joined Rockefeller in 2019. She has been named a V Scholar and a Rita Allen Foundation Scholar, and in 2022 received an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.

MLS lectures are only open to the RU community and will be taking place in Carson Family Auditorium and virtually via Zoom. Virtual participants are required to log in with their RU Zoom account and use their RU email address and password for authentication. We recommend signing out of VPN prior to logging in to the lecture. Please do not share the link or post on social media.

Open to

Campus Only