Heard lab

Developmental Epigenetics Laboratory

In the process of going from a single fertilised egg to an infinitely more complex organism, a number of decisions are made about which genes are switched on or kept off. Once these decisions are made, they must be maintained so that a cell cannot easily divert from its committed fate.

Epigenetics is the study of how this happens without altering the underlying DNA sequence of a genome: together with DNA, many proteins come together to form and organise our chromosomes, and regulation of these epigenetic components is crucial to both health and disease. 
 
One striking example of epigenetic regulation in mammals is X-chromosome inactivation (XCI) – a process ensuring that the genes on one of the two X chromosomes in females are silenced during early development, maintaining balanced gene dosage between XX females and XY males.
 
The Heard lab joined the Crick in 2025 and will explore how XCI is initiated and maintained. We combine approaches from molecular genetics, cell biology, genomics, and imaging to dissect the roles of chromatin structure, non-coding RNA, and 3D chromosome organization in gene regulation. By studying these processes in diverse biological contexts – such as embryos, cultured cells, and cancer tissues – we aim to uncover how changes in chromatin state and chromosomal architecture affect gene expression and disease outcomes.