Emmanuel Cazottes
manucazottes.bsky.social
Emmanuel Cazottes
@manucazottes.bsky.social
Gene regulation, ML and stem cells | Postdoctoral fellow w/ @carldeboer.bsky.social @sbmeubc.bsky.social | PhD w/ @crougeulle.bsky.social @upcite.bsky.social | Roamer of the non-coding genome

🌐 https://emmanuelczt.github.io/
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
SOOOO MANY GENOMICS MODELSSSS! 😱 Often unclear which is best since they benchmark differently! In this preprint, we introduce GAME, a new framework that utilizes APIs to enable sustainable, uniform model evaluation so we can see which is actually best for each task. doi.org/10.1101/2025...
July 11, 2025 at 7:34 AM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
Finally out! 🥳 Our paper showing how a transposable element (TE) insertion can cause developmental phenotypes is now published @natgenet.nature.com 🧬🦠🐁
Below is a brief description of the major findings. Check the full version of the paper for more details: www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02248-5
Enhancer adoption by an LTR retrotransposon generates viral-like particles, causing developmental limb phenotypes - Nature Genetics
Activation of an LTR retrotransposon inserted upstream of the Fgf8 gene produces viral-like particles in the mouse developing limb, triggering apoptosis and causing limb malformation. This phenotype c...
www.nature.com
July 9, 2025 at 10:05 AM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
We tile through ~300 ultra conserved elements 10bp at a time in 6 taxa (some alive, some extinct), to ask, are they the reason the two skulls below- separated by 160 million years of evolution - are so similar?

(image from former PhD student Laura Cook)
July 11, 2025 at 9:46 PM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
The evolutionary foundations of transcriptional regulation in animals www.nature.com/articles/s41... (read free: rdcu.be/evDcA) 🧬🖥️🧪
July 10, 2025 at 3:31 PM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
CAGT was fun! Thanks @carldeboer.bsky.social @sudpinglay.bsky.social and the de Boer lab for organizing! Folks from Seattle, Oregon, and other places. Great community. Arman gave a usual super talk, and Sanchit and Dayag won poster prizes☺️
June 20, 2025 at 10:17 PM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
Postdoc🚨!

Come join our HFSP team to uncover how chromatin moves in cells and what this means for genome function! Great opportunity to combine single-cell genomics, live imaging and polymer physics in the unique mammalian retina with @andersshansen.bsky.social, Davide Michieletto & Sandra Tenreiro
Wissenschaftliche*r Mitarbeiter*in/ Postdoc (m/f/d)
Chromatin ist nicht unbeweglich. Es handelt sich um ein hochdynamisches Material, dessen 3D-Struktur zentrale genomische Prozesse – von der Transkription bis zur DNA-Reparatur – steuert. Doch wie verhält sich Chromatin als Material – als Flüssigkeit, Feststoff oder viskoelastisches Gel –, um diese Funktionen in lebenden Zellen auszuführen? Ohne eine Antwort auf diese Frage können wir nicht vollständig verstehen, wie Chromatin bei Krankheiten gestört wird.
www.mdc-berlin.de
June 20, 2025 at 7:58 AM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
EPIGENETIC HULK READY TO SMASH AGAIN! GET IN LOSERS!
June 13, 2025 at 4:30 AM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
How to find Evolutionary Conserved Enhancers in 2025? 🐣-🐭
Check out our paper - fresh off the press!!!
We find widespread functional conservation of enhancers in absence of sequence homology
Including: a bioinformatic tool to map sequence-diverged enhancers!
rdcu.be/enVDN
github.com/tobiaszehnde...
Conservation of regulatory elements with highly diverged sequences across large evolutionary distances
Nature Genetics - Combining functional genomic data from mouse and chicken with a synteny-based strategy identifies positionally conserved cis-regulatory elements in the absence of direct sequence...
rdcu.be
May 27, 2025 at 12:19 PM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
🧠 Excited to share my main PhD project! We mapped the regulatory rules governing Glioblastoma plasticity using single-cell multi-omics and deep learning. This work is part of a two-paper series with @bayraktarlab.bsky.social @oliverstegle.bsky.social and @moritzmall.bsky.social, Preprint at end🧵👇
May 16, 2025 at 10:05 AM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
Join us on Wednesday next week for two exciting talks on transcription regulation from @kasitc.bsky.social and @davidsuter.bsky.social!

You can register at: us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
May 15, 2025 at 6:35 PM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
Very happy to share the peer-reviewed version of our paper in which we study the formation and function of pair-wise and multi-way enhancer-promoter interactions in gene regulation (see thread below): www.nature.com/articles/s41...
May 13, 2025 at 9:41 AM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
💥🥳 At long last, our latest paper is out!

Gag proteins of endogenous retroviruses are required for zebrafish development

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Led heroically by Sylvia Chang & @jonowells.bsky.social

A study which has changed the way I think of #transposons! No less! 🧵 1/n
Gag proteins encoded by endogenous retroviruses are required for zebrafish development | PNAS
Transposable elements (TEs) make up the bulk of eukaryotic genomes and examples abound of TE-derived sequences repurposed for organismal function. ...
www.pnas.org
April 30, 2025 at 10:45 AM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
I’m very excited to share our work on the early evolution of animal regulatory genome architecture - the main project of my postdoc, carried out across two wonderful and inspirational labs of @arnausebe.bsky.social and @mamartirenom.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Chromatin loops are an ancestral hallmark of the animal regulatory genome - Nature
The physical organization of the genome in non-bilaterian animals and their closest unicellular relatives is characterized; comparative analysis shows chromatin looping is a conserved feature of ...
www.nature.com
May 7, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
🎉 This paper has been a long time and a labour of love (and hardship) for multiple group members, but, finally: we MPRA'ed 25k introgressed variants (Denisovan and Neanderthal) segregating at allele frequencies > 0.15 in humans today to evaluate their potential to regulate gene expression.
Mapping the gene regulatory landscape of archaic hominin introgression in modern Papuans https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.04.652069v1
May 5, 2025 at 2:43 AM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
We quantify the aggregation of >100,000 random protein sequences to train CANYA, a convolution-attention hybrid neural network to predict aggregation from sequence. With @bennibolo.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Massive experimental quantification allows interpretable deep learning of protein aggregation
xAI trained on >100,000 random peptides predicts and elucidates primary sequence determinants of aggregation.
www.science.org
May 4, 2025 at 10:40 AM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
Delighted to share our latest work deciphering the landscape of chromatin accessibility and modeling the DNA sequence syntax rules underlying gene regulation during human fetal development! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Read on for more: 🧵 1/16 #GeneReg 🧬🖥️
Dissecting regulatory syntax in human development with scalable multiomics and deep learning
Transcription factors (TFs) establish cell identity during development by binding regulatory DNA in a sequence-specific manner, often promoting local chromatin accessibility, and regulating gene expre...
www.biorxiv.org
May 3, 2025 at 6:27 PM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
Our preprint on designing and editing cis-regulatory elements using Ledidi is out! Ledidi turns *any* ML model (or set of models) into a designer of edits to DNA sequences that induce desired characteristics.

Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
GitHub: github.com/jmschrei/led...
Programmatic design and editing of cis-regulatory elements
The development of modern genome editing tools has enabled researchers to make such edits with high precision but has left unsolved the problem of designing these edits. As a solution, we propose Ledi...
www.biorxiv.org
April 24, 2025 at 12:59 PM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
One of the toughest parts of the field of massively parallel reporter assays to measure >~thousands of elements is that there are hundreds of pubs using them, but no central repo to easily locate the results....until now! Great collab w/ Jingjing Zhao, Ilias G-S, and @nadavahituv.bsky.social!!
MPRAbase a Massively Parallel Reporter Assay database
An international, peer-reviewed genome sciences journal featuring outstanding original research that offers novel insights into the biology of all organisms
genome.cshlp.org
April 22, 2025 at 6:52 PM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
Vidéos of the symposium are now available online @collegedefrance.bsky.social Just click and enjoy!🙏🏼🤘
#Science #Biologie
🧬 "Enhancers Sequences and Gene Regulation"
🖥️ Les vidéos du colloque organisé par le Pr @denisduboule.bsky.social, titulaire de la chaire Évolution du développement et des génomes, sont disponibles.
👉 www.college-de-france.fr/fr/agenda/co...
April 18, 2025 at 10:04 AM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
I am elated to share that our manuscript describing Variant-EFFECTS, a high-throughput technology we developed to precisely and quantitatively measure the effects of CRISPR-mediated edits on gene expression, is now published at @cellpress.bsky.social: authors.elsevier.com/c/1kxgiL7PXu...
authors.elsevier.com
April 17, 2025 at 6:20 PM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
To the top of the "to-read" list. Looks like a heroic amount of work from the Hahn lab (large-scale ChEC-seq compendium!) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Low overlap of transcription factor DNA binding and regulatory targets - Nature
A near-complete survey of transcription factor activities in Saccharomyces cerevisiae reveals that most transcription factors have both activator and repressor activities and limited overlap between t...
www.nature.com
April 16, 2025 at 4:04 PM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
Join the UBC and SFU Postdocs for a social at the Bloedel Conservatory and Queen Elizabeth Park on Thursday 17th April!

4-5 PM - Bloedel Conservatory (Free Entry)

5 PM - BBQ at QE Park

Feel free to join for both parts of the event or just one.

Register now: ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
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ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com
April 8, 2025 at 9:03 PM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
The importance of moving away from bulk! Occupancy of Pol II at promoters is dramatically different between fly and mouse cells! When looking single molecule! Proud of the team! @kasitc.bsky.social @molinalab.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s443...
April 2, 2025 at 8:47 AM
Reposted by Emmanuel Cazottes
Celebrating 10 years of our lab with a new preprint:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
How does enhancer location within a TAD control transcriptional bursts from a cognate promoter?
Experiments by Jana Tünnermann and modelling by Gregory Roth
March 29, 2025 at 12:46 PM
Join us for the first edition of the Cascadia Advanced Genomic Technologies meeting! We aim at fostering collaborations to tackle critical challenges in mammalian genomics. Info and registration link below 👇
March 26, 2025 at 5:01 PM