Associate Prof @PittBioSci studying transcription dynamics and chromatin biology | passionate about equity in STEM | she/her
Pittsburgh, PA
Joined January 2018
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Delighted to share Ben Patty's thesis research which represents an incredible amount of work, where Ben performed all the experiments and analysis presented in this massive body of work: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…. Ben is looking for a position - find him on LinkedIn!
Proud to be Canadian 🇨🇦
cbc.ca/news/politics/mark-ca…
Sarah Hainer retweeted
🧬🎉 Our new chromatin remodeling study is out: We reveal three states of human CHD1 and identify a novel "anchor element" that interacts with the acidic patch—conserved among remodelers. Our structures clarify mechanisms of remodeler recruitment! Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1l2ik…
Sarah Hainer retweeted
Max Planck President Patrick Cramer @mpgpresident has written an open letter to the President of @Harvard, expressing his full support to the University & its stance against demands from the Trump administration to change its policies in order to retain federal funding @maxplanckpress
ALT A photo of Max Planck President Patrick Cramer, with the words "Threats to science anywhwere are threats to science everywhere."
Sarah Hainer retweeted
This support is highly appreciated! From personal experience: Transatlantic cooperation is a pillar of the scientific enterprise!
Max Planck President Patrick Cramer @mpgpresident has written an open letter to the President of @Harvard, expressing his full support to the University & its stance against demands from the Trump administration to change its policies in order to retain federal funding @maxplanckpress
ALT A photo of Max Planck President Patrick Cramer, with the words "Threats to science anywhwere are threats to science everywhere."
Sarah Hainer retweeted
NSF GRFP #'s cut in half year-on-year
2022: 2193 awards, 1,377 Honorable Mentions
2023: 2555 awards, 801 Honorable Mentions
2024: 2026 awards, 1718 Honorable Mentions
2025: 1000 awards, 3008 Honorable Mentions
The gutting continues apace.
research.gov/grfp/AwardeeLis…
Sarah Hainer retweeted
The U.S. National Institutes of Health’s recent decision to impose a 15% cap on facilities and administrative cost reimbursements is misguided and damaging, argue the authors of a new #SciencePolicyForum. scim.ag/41L2C9P
ALT "The system proposed by NIH cannot accomplish its stated goal of cutting costs while maintaining a high-quality national research system." - Choi et al.
Sarah Hainer retweeted
Big news: we are setting up a new non-profit organization to run bioRxiv and medRxiv. It's called openRxiv [no it's not a new preprint server; it's a dedicated organization to oversee the servers] openrxiv.org 1/n
Sarah Hainer retweeted
BioRxiv is the most important thing that happened in science publishing
Today marks the beginning of OpenRxiv, which replaces bioRxiv and medRxiv, the world's largest preprint platform for life and medical science @openrxiv
Sarah Hainer retweeted
On Valentine’s day, 15 Assistant Professors at NIH who had started their research labs in the last 2 years were fired. Their scientific expertise was built over 10-12 years of training, most if not all of which was supported by NIH. The start up funds for their laboratories were
Sarah Hainer retweeted
1. I feel like this is such obvious advice that it's taken for granted & so no one says this to young scientists but READ PAPERS, read all the papers. As you move up in your career you'll have a lot less time to do this. Read everything that appeals to you not just in your field
Sarah Hainer retweeted
In our SETD2 paper, we visualize a novel nucleosome transfer intermediate during txn. It is the earliest intermediate visualized yet. In the intermediate, the histone chaperone FACT coordinates histone binding with a previously uncharacterized RTF1 helix: tinyurl.com/setd2
We are happy these studies provide new insight into coupling of nucleosome remodeling to transcription elongation. Sarah will be defending her PhD next week!
Excited by these findings we made some mutants in mES cells to ask if disrupting this interaction resulted in similar changes to CHD distribution and nucleosome positions. Perhaps due to complexity or resolution, we don't observe these changes.
Is this mechanism for Chd1 distribution conserved in mammals? To test these we asked if murine CHD1 and CHD2 (close homolog) interact with murine RTF1 using yeast two hybrid, and yes, they do! And in fact, this is the conserved LALA box (LLSLA in mammals) and CHD1/2 CHCT
This disrupted interaction and 5' Chd1 shift then leads to a 5' shift of nucleosomes, subnucleosomes, dinucleosomes, and hexasome-nucleosome (OLDN) complexes.
Using precise mutants that disrupt this interaction, Sarah found 5' shift in Chd1 localization across genes, with modest effects on RNAPII and Rtf1 occupancy
Following up from earlier studies from the Arndt lab, Sarah narrowed the interaction between Rtf1 and Chd1 to a region in the N term of Rtf1 we termed the LALA box and the Chd1 CHCT domain. Notably yeast Chd1 chromodomains do not bind K4me3 like mammalian Chd1 chromodomains
Happy to share the latest preprint which is a close collaboration with @ArndtLab with a shared PhD student, Sarah Tripplehorn. Here we show a direct interaction between Chd1 and Paf1C subunit Rtf1 required for nucleosome positioning across genes: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…
