Dr. Dirk Schübeler

Email: dirk.schuebeler@fmi.ch Dirk Schübeler is a Senior Groupleader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel. His group studies the role of epigenetic modifications of DNA and nucleosomes in transcriptional regulation and genome maintenance. A particular interest is the role of epigenetic regulation in stabilizing transcriptional programs in defined cellular states and how it relates to the developmental potential of a given cell. The regulation of pluripotency of stem cells and their epigenetic reprogramming during differentiation provide important models to address these questions. To understand how stem cell maintenance and loss of pluripotency are regulated via chromatin and DNA methylation the group develops and applies functional genomics approaches. With these quantitative measures of the epigenome are performed to identify regulatory patterns and their function in cell fate decisions. Dirk Schübeler obtained his PhD the Univeristy of Braunschweig and was a postdoctoral fellow with Mark Groudine at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He is an elected member of the European Network of Excellence "The Epigenome", and is an EMBO Young Investigator. He received the Friedrich Miescher Prize of the Swiss Society for Biochemistry in 2006 and a young investigator grant of the European Research Council in 2008.

Recent publications relevant to the Cell Plasticity RTD include

Daujat, S., Weiss, T., Mohn, F., Lange, U. C., Ziegler-Birling, C., Zeissler, U., Lappe, M., Schübeler, D., Torres-Padilla, M-E., and R. Schneider. (2009) H3K64 trimethylation marks heterochromatin and is dynamically remodeled during developmental reprogramming. Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, 16, 777-782 Martin-Subero et al., New insights into the biology and origin of mature aggressive B-cell lymphomas by combined epigenomic, genomic and transcriptional profiling (2009). (Malignant Lymphoma network of the Deutsche Krebshilfe), BLOOD, Mar 12;113(11):2488-97. Mohn, F., Weber, M., Rebhan, M., Roloff, TC., Richter, J.,Stadler, MB., Bibel, M and Schübeler, D. (2008). Lineage-specific Polycomb targets and de novo DNA methylation define restriction and potential of neuronal progenitors, Molecular Cell, 30, 755-766 Bell, O., Wirbelauer, C., Hild, H., Scharf, A., Schwaiger, M., MacAlpine, M., Zilberman, F., van Leeuwen, F.,Bell, S., Imhof, A., Garza, D., Peters, A. and Schübeler, D. (2007) Localized H3K36 methylation states define histone H4K16 acetylation during transcriptional elongation in Drosophila, EMBO Journal, 26, 4974-4984 Chromatin Looping Underlies Polycomb-mediated and DNA-methylation Dependent Silencing in Embryonic and Adult Cancer Cells. (2008) Vijay K. Tiwari, Kelly M. McGarvey, Julien Licchesi, Joyce E. Ohm, James G. Herman, Dirk Schübeler and Stephen B. Baylin, PLoS Biol., 6(12): e30 Ichiro Hiratani, Tyrone Ryba, Mari Itoh, Tomoki Yokochi, Michaela Schwaiger, Chia-Wei Chang, Yung Lyou, Tim M. Townes, Dirk Schübeler and David M. Gilbert. (2008) Global Re-organization of Replication Domains During Embryonic Stem Cell Differentiation, PLoS Biol., 7;6(10):e245 Weber, M., Hellmann, I., Stadler, M., Ramos, L., Pääbo, S., Rebhan, M. and Schübeler, D. (2007). Distribution, silencing potential and evolutionary impact of promoter DNA methylation in the human genome, Nature Genetics, 39, 457-466 Weber, M., Davies, J., Wittig, D., Oakeley, E., Haase, M., Lam, W.L. and Schübeler, D. (2005). Chromosome-wide and promoter-specific analyses reveal sites of differential DNA methylation in normal and transformed human cells. Nature Genetics, 37, 853-62 White, E., Emanuelsson, O., Scalzo, D., Royce, T., Kosak, S., Oakeley, E., Weissman, S., Gerstein, M., Groudine, M., Snyder, M., and Schübeler, D. (2004) DNA replication timing analysis of human chromosome 22 at high resolution and different developmental states. PNAS, 101, 17771-6

Review articles related to Cell Plasticity

Mohn, F. and D. Schübeler. (2009) Genetics and epigenetics: stability and plasticity during cellular differentiation. Trends in Genetics, 25: 129-136 Schübeler, D. (2006). Dosage compensation in high resolution: Global up-regulation through local recruitment. Genes & Development, 20, 749-53 Schübeler, D. (2007) Enhancing genome annotation with chromatin, Nature Genetics, 39, 284-285 Weber, M. and Schübeler, D. (2007) Genomic patterns of DNA methylation: targets and function of an epigenetic mark. Current Opinion in Cell Biology, 19, 273-280 Schübeler, D. and Elgin, S. (2005). Defining epigenetic states through chromatin and RNA, Nature Genetics, 37, 917-918 Peters A.H.F.M. and Schübeler, D. (2005). Histone methylation: Playing Memory with DNA. Current Opinion in Cell Biology, 17(2): 230-238. Ian M. Wilson, Jonathan J. Davies, Michael Weber, Carolyn J. Brown, Carlos E. Alvarez, Calum MacAulay, Dirk Schübeler and Wan L. Lam. (2006) Epigenomics: Mapping the Methylome. Cell Cycle, 2, 155-58

Further Information

http://www.fmi.ch/schuebeler.d/ Full publication list Pubmed