Our latest research lead by Ksenia Skvortsova is out in Science Advances. Check out this fun collaborative effort where we unravel the usage of active DNA demethylation pathways in non-vertebrate lineages. We find that invertebrate deuterostomes such as lancelet and se a urchin use TET enzymes for targeted demethylation of regulatory regions associated with developmental genes and show that the complement of identified 5hmC-regulated genes is conserved to vertebrates. This work demonstrates that active 5mC removal from regulatory regions is a common feature of deuterostome embryogenesis suggestive of an unexpected deep conservation of a major gene-regulatory module.
bogdanoviclab.org 