Crosstalk between cellular metabolism and chromatin and rRNA modifications

I am a BSc in Biological Sciences and a MSc in Functional and Molecular Biology. During my Bachelor’s and my Master’s, I worked in the laboratory of Nutrition and Cancer (Prof. Dr. Gomes-Marcondes, UNICAMP, Brazil), studying the influence of a maternal fish-oil-rich diet on the cancer-cachectic offspring. The interface between environmental stimuli and gene expression intrigues me, therefore epigenetics has always been my biggest interest. Thus, for my PhD, I joined the group “Chromatin Dynamics and Epigenetics” of Dr. Robert Schneider, in the Institute of Functional Epigenetics (Helmholtz Zentrum München). My PhD project is focused on how the links between metabolic enzymes and chromatin and RNA modifiers regulate histone and rRNA modifications. Even though the canonical location of metabolic enzymes is the cytosol, discovering their functions in the nucleus will provide advances in the emerging field of studies on the network between metabolism and gene expression. Moreover, it will provide us insights in the impact of metabolic disturbances on chromatin function.