“Our aim is to understand how chromatin is reprogrammed within hours after a sperm fertilizes a mammalian egg to generate a totipotent one-cell embryo, special in its ability to produce an entire new organism”, says IMBA group leader and EMBO Young Investigator Tachibana, who has pioneered mechanistic cell biology and studies of spatial chromatin organization in zygotes. This question has been one of the ‘holy grails’ of the life sciences and has fascinated (not only) biologists for generations. To this day, hardly anything is known about the underlying mechanism, partly due to the extreme sparsity of mammalian zygotes and their transient existence. Besides, sophisticated methods for the analysis of genome regulation have only recently been developed. 

Tachibana is the project lead and is collaborating with IMP’s scientific director Jan-Michael Peters, Mitinori Saitou (Kyoto University), and Leonid Mirny (MIT). Their project includes innovative ideas that are only possible by the unique combination of expertise from different disciplines. “The composition of the consortium is an “all-star team” that will for the first time combine single-cell genomic approaches, three-dimensional chromatin structure, polymer physics, ovary organoids, biochemistry and single-molecule imaging to uncover principles of reprogramming to totipotency. We are very excited to be part of this great collaboration” says Kikuë Tachibana.