Lectures and seminars Jumping through evolution: How Transposable Elements regulate mammalian genomes
Welcome to a seminar with Dr Marlies Oomen from Helmholtz Munich.
About the speaker and seminar
Dr Marlies Oomen is an EMBO postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla at Helmholtz Munich, where she studies transcriptional regulation of genes and transposable elements in the mammalian preimplantation embryo. This work showed that not only young transposable elements, but also ancient, mammalian-shared repetitive elements become expressed during preimplantation development and can be co-opted for transcriptional regulation of genes.
Dr Oomen performed her PhD in the laboratory of Job Dekker at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and was co-supervised by Bas van Steensel at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. During her PhD she studied chromatin characteristics of mitotic chromosomes, with a particular focus on CTCF binding through the cell cycle. She also developed a novel Hi-C technique called SisterC, which allows for the detection of chromosome interactions between and within sister chromatids.
In this seminar, Dr Oomen will share more about her postdoctoral work on the transcriptional regulation of and by transposable elements in the mammalian preimplantation embryo and share some insights on the research she’s planning on doing in the future.
Selected publications
- An atlas of transcription initiation reveals regulatory principles of gene and transposable element expression in early mammalian development. Cell (2025). Marlies E. Oomen*, Diego Rodriguez-Terrones*, Mayuko Kurome, Valeri Zakhartchenko, Lorenza Mottes, Kilian Simmet, Camille Noll, Tsunetoshi Nakatani, Carlos Michel Mourra-Diaz, Irene Aksoy, Pierre Savatier, Jonathan Goke, Eckhard Wolf, Henrik Kaessmann and Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla. PMID: 39837330
- Jump-starting life: balancing transposable element co-option and genome integrity in the developing mammalian embryo. EMBO reports (2024). Marlies E Oomen and Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla. PMID: 38528171
- Mitotic chromosomes harbor cell-type and species-specific structural features within a universal loop array conformation. Genome Research (2025). Marlies E Oomen, A Nicole Fox, Inma Gonzalez, Amandine Molliex, Thaleia Papadopoulou, Pablo Navarro, Job Dekker. PMID: 40480831
- Detecting chromatin interactions along and between sister chromatids with SisterC. Nature Methods (2020). Marlies E Oomen, Adam K Hedger, Jonathan K Watts, Job Dekker. PMID: 32968250
- CTCF sites display cell cycle–dependent dynamics in factor binding and nucleosome positioning. Genome Research (2019). Marlies E Oomen, Anders S Hansen, Yu Liu, Xavier Darzacq, Job Dekker. PMID: 30655336
Host:
Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics (contact: tamsinlindstrom@ki.se) and Cell and Molecular Biology (contact: laura.baranello@ki.se)