A Talk on ‘Role of protein–protein interactions on organisation and dynamics of a model chromatin’ by Pinaki Swain
About the talk
The three-dimensional organisation of chromatin is influenced by chromatin-binding proteins through both specific and non-specific interactions. However, the roles of chromatin sequence and the interactions between binding proteins in shaping chromatin structure remain elusive. By employing a simple polymer-based model of chromatin that considers sequence-dependent protein binding and protein-protein interactions, we elucidate a mechanism for chromatin organisation. We find that tuning protein-protein interactions and protein concentration is sufficient to either promote or inhibit chromatin compartmentalisation. Moreover, chromatin sequence and protein-protein attraction strongly affect the structural and dynamic exponents that quantify the spatiotemporal organisation of chromatin. Strikingly, our model’s predictions for the exponents governing chromatin structure and dynamics successfully capture experimental observations, in sharp contrast to previous chromatin models. Overall, our findings have the potential to reinterpret data obtained from various chromosome conformation capture technologies, laying the groundwork for advancing our understanding of chromatin organisation.
About the speaker
Pinaki Swain is a biophysicist with a specific interest in understanding the governing principles of genome organisation. He started his academic journey as a chemical engineer. He did BTech in chemical engineering from Biju Patnaik University of Technology, Odisha, and MTech in chemical engineering from IIT Hyderabad. Pinaki continued as a PhD scholar in the Chemical Engineering Department at IIT Hyderabad. During PhD, he became interested in the problem of bacterial chromatin organisation, and biological physics, in general. After completing PhD in 2020, he joined Professor Stephanie Weber’s group at McGill University as a postdoctoral researcher. Since 2022, he has been working as a postdoctoral fellow in the Computational Biology group at IMSc Chennai. Outside work, he enjoys reading science fiction and detective fiction books.