I'm very happy with how the Chromatin Club is growing. We're up to a rotating cast of ~20 people from a variety of labs in Boston. This month we went to Russell House Tavern and had some oysters, steak tips and salmon. Our discussion mostly centered around phase separation this time. This is still a rather contentious topic. On one side, you have a lot of excitment for all the cool phase separation experiments that are being published in high impact journals and on the other side you have the wet blankets (myself included) who complain that i) there is no functionality ascribed to condensates that could also be ascribed to a focus, ii) all those cool invitro experiments don't mean much and the overexpression systems are not biologically relevant. In a lot of ways, it's similar to the chromatin loop extrusion field (I guess it's a field now): there was a lot of resistance to the idea (for good reason) and only now is it gaining acceptance. I look forward to someone showing loop extrusion in a living cell. Other topics of discussion included the Chromatin Club's combined tech review that we are putting together. Hopefully this will be ready by January and will be a good show case for this kind of discussion group!

Left to right: Dushan, Andrew, Tadasu, Jan, Haitham, Assaf, Aditi and Sirui.