Bas van Steensel

We develop and apply new genomics tools to study the structure and functions of genomes, chromosomes and chromatin. This will help to gain fundamental insight that is essential to fully understand cancer.

Principles of Genome Regulation

We aim to elucidate how chromatin proteins work together with DNA sequences to package the genome and regulate gene expression and DNA repair. We study the domain organization of chromatin, and we investigate how enhancers and promoters function in this context.

Genome-nuclear lamina interactions
We discovered LADs, which are large heterochromatin domains that associate with the nuclear lamina. We have developed methods to visualize and map LADs in single cells. We now investigate how LADs are formed, and how they contribute to chromosome architecture and function.

Technologies for chromatin genomics

We have developed DamID, pA-DamID and ^m6A-tracer methods for the mapping and visualization of protein-genome interactions. TRIP measures the impact of chromatin on gene function at thousands of genomic locations in parallel. TIDE(R) is a simple, cheap and quantitative method to measure CRISPR genome editing efficiency. SuRE is a tool for functional mapping of regulatory elements in entire genomes.

Bioinformatics
We view bioinformatics as an integrated part of our research. Hence, all students and postdocs in the lab learn R programming and write their own code.