In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Luciano Di Croce from the Center of Genomic Regulation in Barcelona to talk about his work on epigenetic landscapes in cancer.
The Di Croce Lab focuses on the Polycomb Complex and its influence on diseases like cancer. Luciano Di Croce started out his research career investigating the oncogenic transcription factor PML-RAR. They could show that in leukemic cells knockdown of SUZ12, a key component of Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2), reverts not only histone modification but also induces DNA de-methylation of PML-RAR target genes. More recently the team focused on two other Polycomb related proteins Zrf1 and PHF19 and were able to characterize some of their functions in gene targeting in different disease and developmental contexts.
References
Di Croce, L., Raker, V. A., Corsaro, M., Fazi, F., Fanelli, M., Faretta, M., Fuks, F., Lo Coco, F., Kouzarides, T., Nervi, C., Minucci, S., & Pelicci, P. G. (2002). Methyltransferase recruitment and DNA hypermethylation of target promoters by an oncogenic transcription factor. Science (New York, N.Y.), 295(5557), 1079–1082. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1065173
Richly, H., Rocha-Viegas, L., Ribeiro, J. D., Demajo, S., Gundem, G., Lopez-Bigas, N., Nakagawa, T., Rospert, S., Ito, T., & Di Croce, L. (2010). Transcriptional activation of polycomb-repressed genes by ZRF1. Nature, 468(7327), 1124–1128. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09574
Jain, P., Ballare, C., Blanco, E., Vizan, P., & Di Croce, L. (2020). PHF19 mediated regulation of proliferation and invasiveness in prostate cancer cells. eLife, 9, e51373. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.51373
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