Helmholtz Zentrum München Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Gesundheit und Umwelt

Project description

All biological processes are implemented by individual cells, of which the human body contains an unimaginable large number (approximately 10^13). Surprisingly, it is completely unclear, how it is guaranteed that none of these cells forget the cell type specific roles and behaviors they have to fulfil.
The chosen student would use of cutting edge technology to shed light on this question. She or he will use CRISPR approaches to discover genes and chromatin features causally involved in neural stem cell identity. We have recently established all necessary pre-requisites for this project in our lab, including (A) multiple dCas9 tools [Stricker et al., 2017; Bauman et al., 2019; Bultman et al., 2018], (B) gRNA libraries [Koferle et al., 2016; Koferle & Stricker, 2017; Breunig et al., 2018] and (C) a reliable reporter system for neural stem cell identity [Bauman et al., 2019].  

Related literature

  • Stricker SH et al. (2017). From profiles to function in epigenomics. Nat Rev Genet 18(1):51-66.
  • Bultmann S et al. (2018). Entering the post-epigenomic age: back to epigenetics. Open Biol 8(3).
  • Baumann V et al. (2019). Targeted removal of epigenetic barriers during transcriptional reprogramming. Nature communications 10(1):2119.
  • Koferle A et al. (2016). a universal method for the generation of gRNA libraries for CRISPR-based screening. BMC Genomics 17(1):917.
  • Koferle A, Stricker SH. (2017) A Universal Protocol for Large-scale gRNA Library Production from any DNA Source. JoVE (130):e56264.
  • Breunig CT et al. (2018) One step generation of customizable gRNA vectors for multiplex CRISPR approaches through string assembly gRNA cloning (STAgR). PLoS One 13(4):e0196015.