Professor Nick Gilbert

University of Edinburgh , UK

Nick is a group leader at the MRC Human Genetics unit and is Director of Graduate Research for the Institute of Genetics and Cancer. He started his career as a PhD student in the biochemistry department at Edinburgh University, and continued his training as a postdoc with Professor Wendy Bickmore. He started his lab in the Edinburgh Cancer Research Centre in 2006 with a fellowship from the Wellcome Trust and moved to the Human Genetics Unit in 2012 funded by an MRC Senior Fellowship. Nick is currently an MRC Investigator and holds a Wellcome Investigator award.

Nick’s lab studies how DNA is folded up with proteins to form chromatin inside mammalian cells. Although this has been studied this for many years it is a big problem, mainly because chromatin is a massive macromolecular complex that makes it very difficult to study. Chromatin is central to understanding many nuclear processes and recent next generation sequencing projects have identified many mutations in chromatin proteins in cancer. Surprisingly his group has found that an abundant nuclear protein, SAF-A, that is often mutated in neurodevelopmental disorders is a regulator of chromatin folding and packaging in the nucleus.