DrTony Southall

Tony Southall’s lab is interested in how chromatin remodelling and gene regulatory networks drive the maturation and differentiation of neurons in the developing nervous system. When a neuron is born, it still has a long way to go before it is a full functional unit in the nervous system. Much has been learnt about the cellular changes that a neuron undergoes as it matures, however, much less is known about the chromatin remodelling process that are occurring during neuronal maturation. 

We have also discovered an unexpected role for the condensin complex subunit Cap-G in post-mitotic neurons, where it silences non-neuronal and stem cell genes to maintain cell identity (Hassan et al., 2020). We have also implicated the NuRD chromatin remodelling complex in masking enhancers and silencing non-neuronal genes (Aughey et al., 2023). More recently, we have uncovered a novel, splicing-independent role for the RNA-binding protein Sex-lethal (Sxl) in regulating RNA Polymerase III activity and tRNA synthesis in neurons via the Pol III subunit Polr3E (Storer et al., in revision).

Other focus areas of the lab include the discovery and characterisation of small open reading frame-encoded peptides (sORF-peptides) functions in the nervous system and screening for peptides that block disease relevant protein-protein interactions, with potential therapeutic applications for targeting "undruggable" proteins. 

We use the cell-type specific profiling technique Targeted DamID (TaDa; Southall et al., 2013) to map the transcriptional state, and the genomic binding of regulatory factors, and have also developed CATaDa for profiling chromatin accessibility in vivo in a cell-specific manner (Aughey et al., 2018). We have also developed AGES, a method for auxin-inducible temporal control of the GAL4/UAS system in Drosophila (McClure et al., 2022).