Dr. Axel Schumacher     CV      
My interest in the field of epigenetics started already in the mid-90's, when I began to work on 'Genomic Imprinting' in the Lab of Dr. Wolf Reik at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge/UK. Realizing the potential of epigenetic research, I pursued this direction during my diploma and graduate period at the Institute of Genetics at Cologne University where I was fortunate to work under the guidance of Prof. Walter Doerfler, one of the founders of DNA methylation research and a renowned scientist in the field of epigenetics. Part of my work was on transgene-methylation, where we identified a strain-specific de novo, non-Mendelian transgene methylation activity, which may inactivate transgenes. This research led to the fact, that nowadays, labs use preferably specific mouse strains in transgene-research to avoid inactivation. Building on my experiences from Cambridge, I had the idea to study genomic imprinting for my diploma.
My research progressed quickly and - still a student - I had my first publication, a paper on Prader-Willi and Angelman syndrome in Nature Genetics. My early success encouraged me to pursue this direction, which gave me the opportunity to work with other first-rate experts in this intriguing field, for instance Dr. Robert Feil (Montpellier), Prof. Horsthemke (Essen), Dr. Karin Buiting (Essen) and Prof. Jörn Walter (Saarbrücken), among others. During my research career I also gained expertise in several other important fields, such as embryonic stem cell biology, neuronal differentiation, and transgene technology. For the latter, I spend several months in the lab of Prof. Klaus Rajewsky, the inventor of the Cre-lox technology for making conditional gene knock-outs in mice. Using my expertise in embryonic stem cell technology, I started to investigate the stability of epigenetic patterns in mouse embryonic stem cells and developed a new method using the alkaloid Staurosporine to differentiate ES cells to neuronal cells.
At that time it was nearly impossible to interrogate DNA sequences larger than a few hundred basepairs. Hence, for a long time, many phenomena in Epigenetics remained a mystery since no methods were available to tackle these problems. However, with the advent of microarray technology a new avenue was opened to study epigenetic patterns on much larger scales. So, to learn more about microarray technology I went to the lab of Jan Dumanski at the Rudbeck Laboratories in Uppsala/Sweden, where I gained the knowledge to follow the idea of developing epigenetic high-throughput technologies such as 'epigenetic' microarrays that enable to interrogate large genomic regions or whole genomes.
An ideal use for such technology would be the study of complex diseases. As a result, I decided then to move to Toronto to work as postdoctoral fellow with Arturas Petronis, who - at that time - started to use epigenetic profiling in complex neurobehavioural diseases. Art was just moving into a new lab and I was largely responsible to set up a new laboratory fully dedicated to epigenomic profiling. Within a few months, I developed a new methodology, which we termed 'epigenetic' microarrays. After improving the technology, we published it as the cover story in Nucleic Acids Research. The feedback to this paper, which was one of the most downloaded NAR papers of 2006, was amazing for me. Scientist and companies from all over the world contacted us to learn more about the possibilities of the technology. The new technology was eventually so successful, that we filed for an international patent and finally licensed it to a leading European Biotech company. Together with Dr. James Flanagan (London/UK), we then used our technology to perform a comprehensive analysis of DNA methylation variation between and within the germlines of normal males. This study provided evidence for significant epigenetic variability in human germ cells. The paper (Flanagan et al., 2006; published in the American Journal of Human Genetics), was featured in news stories and was chosen by the Nature Reviews Genetics journal as one of the Research Highlights 2006. We also applied this technology on the study of complex neurobehavioural diseases (i.e schizophrenia and bipolar disease; AJHG (2008), in press). In 2006 I moved to Munch where I established an epigenomics core facility at the Klinikum rechts der Isar of the Technical University Munich. Currently we work predominantly on the epigenetics of Alzheimer's disease genes, pancreatitis, gastrointestinal cancers and the phenomenon of epigenetic drift.

Currently no members in the Epigenetics section.

Dr. Arturas Petronis
Art's group group has performed a comprehensive re-analysis of the main etiological theories of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and concluded that the epigenetic paradigm is able to unify, under the epigenetic "umbrella", a wide variety of biological and psychological theories as well as empirical findings that pertain to major psychosis. The epigenetic theory does not reject the role of DNA sequence variation but rather suggests that in complex diseases contribution of epigenetic factors may be substantial, and DNA sequence variation within genes should be investigated in parallel with epigenetic regulation of genes. Epigenetics may become the 'master key' to numerous 'locks' of major psychosis and other psychiatric disorders.

Dr. Sun-Chong Wang
Sun Chong is an Assistant Professor at the institute of Systems Biology and Bioinformatics, National Central University Jhongli city, Taiwan. He works on the numbers behind epigenetics.

Thomas Schwarzbraun
Thomas works with Drosophila at the Institut für Medizinische Biologie und Humangenetik der Uni Graz.