News

2025

LEAF Gold award

We are very excited to have been awarded a LEAF Gold award for Sustainability practices in the lab.

Welcome David!

David Proudlove has joined us for the summer supported by a fellowship from Hertford College. He will be coming back in September for his partII studying the role of KZFPs on locus-specific TE expression

EMBO course on TEs

The lab was busy teaching and participating at the embo course on TEs in the genomic era organised by Alexandre Paschoal at Didcot. It was such a great time to learn more about TEs and how to study them with all the great genomics tools available nowadays. Great discussions and great fun.

Welcome Daniel!

We are very happy to welcome our newest labmember Daniel Phillips to the lab. Daniel is studying TE expression in oocyte to 2cell stage embryo transition to uncover the effect of ZGA and potential maternal or paternal effects.

Lab picnic celebrations

We are very excited about the acceptance of our most recent paper which will come out officially soon, so watch this space.

Berrens lab at Genetics society conference

We had an amazing time at the recent TE conference organised by the genetics society. Francesco, Lauryn and Sophie presented their work in posters and Rebecca gave a short talk on the current activities in the lab.

2024

Congratulations

To Lauryn Deaville for passing her transfer viva and Francesco Rivetti for passing the proposal viva!

Welcome Chuzhi!

We are very happy to welcome our newest labmember Chuzhi Zhao to the lab. Chuzhi will work on target enrichment of LINE1 for direct RNA-seq.

P2 solo arrived!

Very excited about the newest lab member joining the Berrenslab. Beware Transposable Elements long reads are coming for you

Lab logo

Thanks to the creativity of our very own DPhil Student Sophie Marlow we now have a lab logo!

Welcome lunch

We are very happy that our Senior Research Associate Mafalda Almeida as well as our Part II student Callan Chambers joined the team.

Move to Biochemistry

We are excited to start a new chapter in the Department of Biochemistry Oxford. The move was a lot of work, although it was just down the hill. Thank you team!

New Funding

We are delighted to share that Rebecca received an 8-year Career Development award from the Wellcome Trust to develop the groups work on "Transposable elements in development"

Lab welcome lunch

As a tradition we are welcoming our new lab members with a lab lunch: Very warm welcome to our Research Associate Emila Skirmuntt. Very warm Wellcome to our rotation DPhil Student Francesco Rivetti and Genomics Medicine Msc student Nisrina Fatiha.

Summer party

We had a great time at the IDRM Summer party. It was great weather and loads of fun with ice cream and nibbles.

ICTE 2024

First conference for the Transposon Group. We all went to the ICTE 2024 in St Malo. David, Lauryn and Sophie presented their work in the poster sessions.

Lab outing!

Lab outing to Jesus College, thank you for hosting us, Sophie!

Paper alert

In this paper we discovered a conserved role for the human piRNA pathway in transposon silencing and a new protein called C19ORF84, which is essential for orchestrating piRNA-directed DNA methylation to silence transposable elements. This paper was published in collaboration with the O'Carroll group in Edinburgh

2023

08/2023: We have to say goodby to Sophie our Research Assistant and the first lab member of the Berrens lab. She is leaving the lab to start her DPhil in Oxford in October 2023. We wish her all the best for the future!
08/2023: Francesco is leaving the lab after successfully finishing his MSc in Genomic Medicine. He will be back in Oxford from October to start his DPhil. We wish him all the best for the future!
07/2023: Lauryn is starting as the first DPhil student in the Berrens lab
05/2023: Dilpreet Bahia is leaving the lab as our first Part II student. We wish her all the best for the future!
04/2023: Francesco Moretti is starting as a Master student in the Berrens lab

2022

Dining with Dinosaurs to celebrate Sophie receiving her DPhil offer. (December, 2022)

The Berrenslab started operations in IDRM welcoming its first members. (September, 2022)

09/2022: Dilpreet Bahia is joining as a Part II student
09/2022: Sophie Marlow is joining as a Research Assistant

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