Current Methods for Nuclear Envelope and Chromatin Research

TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Guest Editor

Daniel Bar

Tel Aviv University, Faculty of Medicine, Israel

Dr. Bar is a principal investigator at the Faculty of Medicine at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. His research focuses primarily on understanding the molecular mechanisms of aging. Dr. Bar gained his bachelor’s degree in physics and biology from Tel Aviv University. He later went on to complete his PhD in genetics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the lab of Prof. Gruenbaum. Here, Dr. Bar worked on the nuclear lamina and lifespan regulating pathways in C. elegans. He continued to a visiting-fellow position at the lab of Dr. Collins at the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Institutes of Health, USA. He worked on proximity labeling, focusing on the nuclear lamina in primary human samples, before returning to Israel to take up his current position.

Collection Overview

The nuclear lamina (NL) is a meshwork of lamins and associated proteins, adjacent to the inner side of the nuclear envelope. The NL has multiple structural and functional roles, including in mechanical support to the nucleus, connecting the nucleus to the cytoskeleton, regulation of gene expression, and chromatin organization.

Exploring the protein composition of the nuclear envelope, and its interactions with DNA, is thus of great interest. Moreover, mutations to nuclear lamina genes, and particularly the lamin A/C gene, cause multiple distinct diseases, including muscle dystrophies, lipodystrophies and at least three premature aging syndromes. However, exploring these interactions is made difficult by the insoluble nature of the lamin meshworks.

To address this challenge, multiple methods have been developed, with some pioneering work done at the nuclear lamina gaining wide adoption for mapping interactions in other cellular locations. This Methods Collection aims to collate current methods available for the exploration of roles of the nuclear lamina. These include mechanical models, biochemical methods, and combinations of genetic and biochemical approaches, used to map proteins and DNA at the nuclear lamina.