Transcriptional condensates in health and disease
Dr. Denes Hnisz
Do you want to know the secrets of your most important genes? Do you like solving puzzles with a creative and collaborative approach? Do you find any aspect of transcription, stem cell, developmental or disease biology particularly interesting?
The mission of the Hnisz Lab is to discover principles that underlie control of transcriptional programs during development and disease. We recently proposed a model that transcriptional regulatory proteins can form phase-separated ‘transcriptional condensates’ that play important roles in mammalian cells (Hnisz et al., Cell 2017). The central theme of the lab is to use the transcriptional condensate model to solve major outstanding problems in transcription-, developmental- and disease biology. We combine advanced imaging, biochemical, genomic, and computational tools, and work in highly collaborative teams.
Successful candidates will develop projects inspired by the condensate model. For some examples see our recent work on i) the molecular basis of condensate formation: Basu et al, Cell 2020; ii) condensate dysregulation in rare genetic diseases: Mensah et al., Nature 2023; engineering phase separation to program transcription: Naderi et al., Nat Cell Bio 2024; and iv) innovating tools to investigate the unique interior of biomolecular condensates: Zhang et al., Nature 2025.
We work closely with several labs at the institute, including those of Martin Vingron, Alexander Meissner, Matthew Kraushar, Stefan Mundlos, and Daniel Ibrahim. We are open to creative collaborative project ideas with these and other labs.
For more information, have a look at the website of the Multi-level Gene Control Group.
The condensate killswitch prevents entry of viral capsid protein IIIa into 52K condensates. Images of human cells expressing 52K or 52K-killswitch together with IIIa fused with green fluorescent protein (GFP) are shown. Insets are zoomed-in images of condensates highlighted with yellow boxes. Dashed line highlights the cell nucleus. Scale bar: 5 µm. From Zhang et al., Nature 2025.
