October 7, 2025
We celebrated another highly successful thesis defense. Huge congratulations to Dr. Haoming Yu!




We celebrated another highly successful thesis defense. Huge congratulations to Dr. Haoming Yu!




New preprint! In an outstanding collaboration with the Stergachis lab at UW and Tommy Tullius at Princeton, we applied Fiber-seq to get a single-molecule glimpse of the nucleosome-protamine landscape in human sperm:
Protamine lacunae preserve the paternal chromatin landscape in sperm
Shannon defended her thesis - congratulations Dr. Rainsford!
Check out two new papers out from the lab:
In PNAS:
SMARCA5 restricts chromatin accessibility to promote male meiosis and fertility in mammals
In Genes & Development:
H3K4me3 amplifies transcription at intergenic active regulatory elements
Congratulations all!!!
Five years and one day after she joined the lab, we celebrated Dr. Kira Marshall's thesis defense. Op-awesome!

Justin is officially the lab's newest PhD student - welcome!
Kira's paper is out! By comparing testis transcriptomes of opossum and mouse, we found hundreds of genes selected for high expression during spermatogenesis in the placental mammal lineage, potentially important for understanding human fertility.
In Developmental Cell (PMC link coming soon)
It's Yongyan's last day - we'll miss you!
Farewell lunch for summer undergraduates Riya and Peyton + Amgen scholars symposium. Peyton presented an excellent talk and poster on evolution of bivalency. We're very proud!