Page 51 - Rappaport Institute Magazine 2024

PHYSIOLOGY, BIOPHYSICS AND SYSTEMS BIOLOGY
48-49
Interdisciplinary approaches for understanding genome structure and function
Research Summary: The spatial organization of the genome is closely related to how it is accessed, regulated and activated by cellular machinery. My interdisciplinary group studies this profound connection between genomic information and its physical organization. Our research combines experimental and computational methods to gain a mechanistic understanding of how the genome encodes its organization and how this organization conveys biological function in various biological systems and diseases. One focus of our lab is the sperm genome. In collaboration with the group of Satoshi Namekawa (UC Davis), we were able to measure for the first time the structure of the genome during spermatogenesis. In contrast to mitosis, in which all chromosomal structures are erased, we found that when chromosomes undergo meiosis genomic structures are maintained and potentially inherited. Another focus of our lab is how genomic structures are specified by molecular information. Using computational models, we were able to reverse-engineer the intricate compartmentalization of genomes and found that they can be explained by a few simple rules involving the interactions of elementary states.
Selected Publications
ˆ Alavattam KG, Maezawa S, Sakashita A, Khoury H, Barski A, Kaplan N*, Namekawa SH*. 2019. Attenuated chromatin compartmentalization in meiosis and its maturation in sperm development. Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. 26: 175-184. (featured on cover).
ˆ Kariti H, Feld T, Kaplan N. 2023. Hypothesis-driven probabilistic modelling enables a principled perspective of genomic compartments. Nucleic Acids Research. 51:1103-1119. ˆ Golov AK, Gavrilov AA, Kaplan N*, Razin SV*. 2024. A genome-wide nucleosome- resolution map of promoter-centered interactions in human cells corroborates the enhancer- promoter looping model. eLife. 91596.
Grants and Awards
HFSP Long Term Fellowship
Clore Scholars Programme
Azrieli Faculty Fellows Program (2016), Israel Science Foundation Personal Grant (2017)
noam.kaplan@technion.ac.il
Noam Kaplan Lab
Noam Kaplan, Phd Senior Lecturer of Genomics
PhD,2011 – Weizmann Institute of Science, Israe
A Hi-C genomic interaction heatmap depicting the structure of mouse chromosome 2 during meiosis