Danesh Sabi Moazed

Moazed has made seminal contributions in epigenetics, including key discoveries regarding the establishment and maintenance of chromatin domains for stable inheritance of gene regulatory states. In budding yeast, his group combined biochemistry with in vivo approaches to show how Sir proteins interact and spread along the chromatin fiber. In fission yeast, he discovered that chromatin-modifying complexes associate with specific chromosome regions by using nascent noncoding RNA as assembly templates. The use of small RNAs as scaffolds for recruitment of chromatin modifying complexes now appears to be widespread, revealing a fundamental new mechanism for heritable gene regulation.