About Arun
Arun performed his master’s in Biology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. During his studies he explored different avenues of both basic and applied research by performing several short-term internships. He did his thesis project to understand the nucleosome organization of heterochromatin in Schizosaccahromyces pombe in the Müller-Planitz lab. He adopted a regulatable system to ectopically induce heterochromatin formation and mapped the nucleosome landscape by switching between hetero- and euchromatic states using an improved MNase – Seq protocol. Working on this project spurred his interest towards chromatin research. To this end, he joined the Helin lab for his PhD in April 2019 and he is currently studying the role of histone serine 28 phosphorylation in maintaining cell identity in mammals. Using mouse embryonic stem cells as the model system together with CRISPR-Cas9 base editing technology he would like to address the following aims
i) Directly assess the function of histone phosphorylation in regulating the chromatin architecture
ii) Understand the significance of H3S28 phosphorylation towards gene expression
iii) Investigate the existence of crosstalk if any, with other histone post translational modifications through structure function analysis
iv) Gain mechanistic insights on the regulation of chromatin states