Chromatin and Sandwiches II

For this meeting we had lunch at the Hourly Oyster House next to new Smith Campus Building. Joining us from MIT was Assaf Amitai from the labs of Arup Chakraborty and Mehran Kardar. Assaf's background is applied math, modeling, simulations and statistical physics and I've previously worked with him to model chromatin as a polymer. Dushan Wadduwage also joined us today. He is my colleague and fellow, fellow from the Center for Advanced Imaging. Dushan is currently working on a number of computational imaging projects including deep learning methods to denoise images. This made for an interesting conversation as Tadasu shared his need to have low light imaging conditions for his experimental setups. 

During lunch we also discussed the ChromEM paper (Ou et al, Science). This is one of my favorite articles as I thought it beautifully showed the structure of chromatin inside the nucleus. However, a point was raised about the lack of convincing evidence of 30 nm fibers in chicken erythrocytes which I was previosuly unaware of. 

We discussed the recent paper from Garini and Appelbaum (Zada et al., 2019) which shows a potential role in potential role in reducing DNA damage in neurons during sleep. An exciting an unexpected finding! This led into a general discussion of applying chromatin dyanmics to neuroscience questions. We also talked about the famous inverted Rod nuclei and speculated on euchromatin being a light sensor.

Lastly I gave a short summary of the chromatin meeting I attended in the Bahamas.

lads

Left to right: Andrew Seeber, Dushan Wadduwage, Akwazi Agbleke, Assaf Amitai and Tadasu Nozaki.