Webinars
Transcription webinar
Feb. 5, 2026 | 10–11:10 a.m. Eastern | Free registration required
The monthly ASBMB Transcription Webinars aim to facilitate knowledge exchange and collaboration among researchers in the fields of transcription, chromatin and epigenetics. Each session will feature presentations from two or three leading experts who will share their latest research on transcriptional regulation by chromatin and RNA polymerase.
The series is organized by Kai Ge, chief of the Adipocyte Biology & Gene Regulation Section at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and Yan Jessie Zhang, distinguished professor in biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin.
Speakers
LDB1 establishes normal and leukemogenic enhancer networks
Gerd Blobel, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
I will discuss the role of LDB1 and its cofactor SSBP3 in connecting enhancer elements and gene promoters. I will consider LDB1 function in the context of the architectural factors CTCF and cohesin. My presentation will include recent unpublished findings on LDB1 connecting oncogenic enhancers and promoters in T-cell malignancies.
Uncovering critical lysines in mammalian histone H3 with high-throughput CRISPR prime editing
Alex Radzisheuskaya, Institute of Cancer Research
Histone proteins are central to regulating eukaryotic genomes, and their post-translational modifications play key roles in controlling gene expression, DNA repair and chromatin structure. Understanding the functions of individual histone modifications is a significant challenge in mammalian chromatin biology, primarily due to the multiple copies of histone genes found in mammalian genomes. In this talk, I will present a high-throughput CRISPR prime editing platform that allows for base-precise, combinatorial and reversible mutagenesis of all canonical and non canonical histone H3 genes within their native genomic context. Using this system, we systematically substituted each lysine residue in histone H3 with arginine and compared each mutation against synonymous lysine-to-lysine controls. This study presents the first comprehensive functional map of histone H3 lysines in a mammalian system, establishing a broadly applicable platform for dissecting histone modifications with advancedprecision.
