A new review by first author Carlos Perea-Resa in the Blower lab was recently published in Trend in Cell Biology (Cohesin: Behind Dynamic Genome Topology and Gene Expression Reprogramming)
In spite of sharing the same DNA molecules, cells in our body show different shape and function as a consequence of differential gen
e expression. Studying how cells organize and read the instructions contained in the DNA is essential to fully understand organism development and the etiology of developmental diseases. A growing body of studies evidence the central role of the cohesin complex in both, organizing and reading genomic information. In this review published at Trends in Cell Biology, this article revises the most recent literature about how cohesin regulates gene expression. The article pays special attention to the role of cohesin in cell shifts across different stages of the cell cycle and during cell fate determination events in development. They also propose a scenario to explain the molecular etiology of Cornelia de Lange Syndrome, a developmental disease caused by cohesin disfunction on gene expression regulation.