Michael Chiang

Super excited to share our latest work looking at mechanisms that contribute to local hexatic and nematic ordering in tissue monolayers! Intercellular friction and motility drive orientational order in cell monolayers | PNAS pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

We are excited to announce our new manuscript is on bioRxiv edin.ac/3z7hhBH. We use super-resolution imaging, molecular biology and polymer simulations to show that nuclear RNA forms an interconnected network of microgels. Well done everyone!

M. Chiang, A. Hopkins, B. Loewe, M. Cristina Marchetti, D. Marenduzzo, Intercellular Friction and Motility Drive Orientational Order in Cell Monolayers. arXiv [cond-mat.soft] (2023). arxiv.org/abs/2310.20465

@IanMurrayMP Could you please RT this post to further raise awareness of the incident and increase the likelihood of finding a witness? It happened not far from your office. 🙏

Could everyone in Edinburgh please RT this to maximise the chance of finding a witness of the incident? I suffered a head injury and broke a few teeth because of it and so far there has been no luck with any CCTV footage. The exact timing was more like 8:15am on that day

@talkstough Hi Graeme, thanks for the reply. I got a call from a first aid responder at 0819, and by that time I was already being pulled off to the kerb waiting for an ambulance. Any chance you were cycling with a dash-cam? It could still provide vital info of vehicles passed by beforehand.

@michaelchchiang i didn't see the incident or any aftermath. If it assists re timing i went northbound (by bike) there at 0820 (almost exactly) per Strava. Was your incident therefore after that time?

@Jacobfarr31 Hi Jacob, thanks for the reply. Is there any chance for the news channel you work for to RT the post by the police?

@michaelchchiang Hey Michael - I work as a local news reporter. Let me know if we can help raise awareness from your perspective to try to find a witness. Hope you are ok.

So far, most DNA-loop-extrusion data were taken on naked DNA. But what happens on chromatin in cells where DNA is loaded with many proteins? Will SMC proteins (that are fast but weak motor proteins) get blocked? Or find a way to translocate the roadblock into the extruded loop? /

We have a new postdoc position available in our collaborative research group. Using molecular biology and imaging techniques to study and understand transcriptional noise. Get in touch if you would like to chat or apply here edin.ac/3VyQJQE

It's been an awesome week learning and discussing new science at the #EMBOworkshop on Nuclear Structure and Dynamics. Many thanks again to the organisers for giving me the opportunity to speak about our lab's work on HiP-HoP and 3DGene (3dgene.igc.ed.ac.uk)!

What a fantastic experience so far at the Genome Organisation by SMC Complexes conference! It's been great to present my simulation work on 3D gene structure and transcriptional noise and learn about all the exciting new science of SMC proteins. #BioChemEvent

Our work on chromosome micro-manipulation in living cells is out in @ScienceMagazine! science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… What if you could put your hand 🫳 inside a nucleus, grab a small portion of a chromosome 👌, and see how it reacts when you pull on it? 🤔 … 🧵 1/n

One new application of the DFCC method for studying nuclear organization. Check out our new story on how RNA Pol II movement during transcription is coordinated over long-range in the context of chromatin dynamics, tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

A cool web tool for browsing the simulated gene structures from our paper 'Gene structure heterogeneity drives transcription noise within human chromosomes'. 3dgene.igc.ed.ac.uk Here is one of my favourite genes - what's yours?

Overall, our work showed two major links between gene structure and transcription: (1) the formation of phase-separated TF condensates drives average transcriptional activity. (2) diversity in gene topology and loop extrusion contribute to transcriptional noise. 10/10

To validate the correlation between noise and loop extrusion, we ran simulations without extrusion. In line with previous work, we saw no notable change in the average transcriptional activity of the genes, but there was a significant decrease in their transcriptional noise. 9/10

A #tweetorial of this work: @chromatinlab Studying the link between gene structure and transcription has been a long-standing problem in chromatin biology. Here, we elucidate trends between these two aspects by simulating the structure of all genes across the human genome. 1/10