Babraham Institute

Separable downmodulation of meiotic axis protein deposition and DNA break induction at chromosome ends

Abstract In many organisms, meiotic crossover recombination is suppressed near the extreme ends of chromosomes. Here we show that multiple, often chromosome-specific, suppressive mechanisms with differing ranges contribute to the consistently low enrichment of recombination-promo...

Nanoparticle accumulation in the lymph node is impaired in aged mice

Abstract Vaccine responses are impaired in aged mice and older people. A key first step in mounting successful responses to vaccines is for antigens to access the draining lymph node from the site of injection. Here we tested the hypothesis that nanoparticle drainage to the lymph...

Tumor-derived antioxidants suppress immunity by depriving T cells of reactive oxygen species

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) promote genomic instability and fuel oncogenic signaling in cancer, but antioxidant therapies have so far failed to improve, or worsen, cancer outcomes. Emerging data suggest that T cells depend on ROS for signal transduction. In this study, we show...

Two distinct domains in mouse IG-DMR of the Dlk1–Dio3 locus confer imprinted DNA methylation in transgenic mice

Abstract Faithful maintenance of allele-specific methylation at imprinting control regions (ICR) is essential for genomic imprinting. Using transgenic mice (TgM), we investigated sequence requirements for paternal methylation acquisition and maternal hypomethylation maintenance d...

Engineering antigenic breadth against SARS-CoV-2 by pairing divergent RBDs within a single mRNA immunogen

Abstract Vaccines capable of eliciting broadly neutralising antibodies (bnAbs) are a major goal for pandemic preparedness. A persistent challenge across vaccine Wields is how to deliberately recruit the rare B cell clones that recognise conserved epitopes shared across diverse vi...

Phosphoproteomics identifies the DYRK1B protein kinase as a regulator of processing bodies

ABSTRACT Dual-specificity tyrosine-phosphorylation-regulated kinase 1B (DYRK1B) modulates the cell cycle, cell fate during development, and is deregulated in cancer and metabolic syndrome. However, only a few DYRK1B substrates have been defined, so we undertook a phosphoproteomic...

Reversible epiblast regionalization determines differentiation potential of human pluripotent stem cells

Abstract Although human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) can generate all tissues of the body, hPSCs in vitro frequently exhibit differentiation biases or failure that pose substantial challenges for disease modeling and regenerative medicine. The origins of these biases remain inc...

A compendium of next-generation patient-derived models for diverse cancers

Abstract The development of new therapeutics and the validation of pathogenetic cancer mechanisms require representative laboratory models 1,2 . However, existing collections represent only a fraction of the diversity observed in human cancer 2–4 . Recent technologies have enable...