Hendrik Marks's Biography

Hendrik Marks, Post Doctoral Researcher, Nijmegen Centre for Molecular Life Sciences/Radboud University

Since the start of my scientific career, my research interests and activities have focussed on transcription regulation and chromatin. My drive to apply state-of-the-art technologies has been key to successfully perform comprehensive studies at genome-wide scale. During my PhD, I pioneered with microarrays and DNA motif analysis to reveal the kinetics and transcriptional mechanisms of White Spot Syndrome Virus gene expression. In 2006, I joined the lab of Prof. Henk Stunnenberg in Nijmegen (the Netherlands) to initiate epigenetic profiling of embryonic stem cells (ESCs), and actively participated in setting up RNA-Seq and ChIP-Seq on the newly acquired NGS sequencer. I exploited these tools to reveal the spread of heterochromatinization and transcriptional silencing during X inactivation in female ESCs. Additionally, I contributed to the unravelling of the interplay between H3K27me3 and DNA methylation and to various other epigenetic studies on ESCs and embryogenesis. In my most recent paper last year in Cell, I characterized the transcriptome and epigenome of ground state pluripotent ESCs. My current focus is on DNA methylation in the pluripotent ground state, as well as on single cell RNA-Seq.