Upcoming Events--Institute of Zoology Chinese Academy of Sciences

　　Fertilization marks the beginning of a new life. This is followed by drastic epigenetic reprogramming that converts terminally differentiated oocyte and sperm to totipotent embryos. However, how chromatin is reprogrammed at the DNA level in early development is poorly understood. Furthermore, whether histone modifications, the crucial epigenetic regulators, can be passed on from parents to the next generation is a long-standing question that remains elusive. By developing cutting-edge technologies, we recently investigated dynamic regulation of chromatin and histone modifications from gametes to the next generation in mice. In addition, we also showed how parental memory is controlled by a simple isoform switch of an epigenetic regulator. Our studies not only revealed extremely dynamic, non-canonical epigenomic reprogramming that accompanies early embryogenesis, but also shed lights on the fundamental principles underlying epigenetic inheritance between generations.

　　Selected publications:　　

Bingjie Zhang,* …, Jie Na,^# Wei Xie^# (2016). Allelic reprogramming of the histone modification H3K4me3 in early mammalian development. Nature 537 (553-557).　　
Hui Zheng,* …, Wei Xie^# (2016). Resetting epigenetic memory by reprogramming of histone modifications in mammals. Molecular Cell 63 (1066-1079).　　
Jingyi Wu,* …, Wei Xie^#(2016). The landscape of accessible chromatin in mammalian preimplantation embryos. Nature 534 (652-657).　　
Wei Xie^#, Bing Ren^# (2013) Enhancing Pluripotency and Lineage Specification, Science 341:245-7　　
Wei Xie, …, and Bing Ren (2013) Epigenomic Analysis of Multi-lineage Differentiation of Human Embryonic Stem Cells, Cell 153: 1134-1148).　　
Wei Xie, … and Bing Ren (2012) Base-resolution analyses of sequence and parent-of-origin dependent DNA methylation in the mouse genome, Cell 148: 816-831.　　
Wei Xie, et al. (2009) Histone H3 lysine 56 acetylation is linked to the core transcriptional network in human embryonic stem cells, Molecular Cell, 33(4):417-427.