A new EU-funded Innovative Training Network (ITN) in the field of infection biology and chromatin biology will begin at our Department. The ITN on “Cell2Cell Heterogeneity” is a program that is devoted to the question of why some pathogens within a population regularly succeed in establishing long-term infections, while others can be effectively controlled. The network will be coordinated jointly by Dr. Sigurd Braun (Physiological Chemistry, Faculty of Medicine) and Nicolai Siegel, Professor of Molecular Parasitology (Experimental Parasitology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine). more

The parasite Trypanosoma brucei causes sleeping sickness. It evades human defences by changing the version of a protein that coats its surface. In this paper the group of Nicolai Siegel report the de novo haplotype-specific assembly and scaffolding of the long antigen-gene arrays of the model protozoan parasite Trypanosoma brucei, using long-read sequencing technology and conserved features of chromosome folding. Genome-wide chromosome conformation capture reveals a distinct partitioning of the genome, with antigen-encoding subtelomeric regions that are folded into distinct, highly compact compartments. more