M. Joaquina Delás

Scientist at The Francis Crick Institute.

I am fascinated by how cells acquire their diverse fates from the same set of DNA instructions. During development, when the map to adult tissues is established, tightly controlled gene expression is essential for cell fate decisions. Regulatory sequences, or cis regulatory elements, within the vast non-coding genome control this precise gene expression. But our ability to identify and predict the activity of these elements from primary genomic sequence and our knowledge of how these elements function is limited. The primary goal of my research is to understand how the noncoding genome regulates cell fate decisions during development. My strategy to achieve this is to study the mechanistic principles of cis regulatory elements in a developmentally relevant model, the developing spinal cord. My long-term goal is understand and predict the function of noncoding DNA sequence and the impact of variants for healthy tissue development and disease.

I am currently a postdoc in the laboratory of James Briscoe, where I have uncovered distinct regulatory strategies that ventral neural progenitors use for specification in response to the same signal, Sonic Hedgehog.

In my PhD, I studied how long non-coding RNAs regulate stem cell differentiation and self-renewal in hematopoiesis and malignant transformation. I carried out this with in the laboratory of Greg Hannon, first at at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, US and later at CRUK Cambridge Institute, UK, supported by PhD fellowships from “laCaixa” Foundation and Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds.

Throughout my studies in Spain, I have benefited from funded research opportunities that were essential to shape my training. This included Erasmus Placement funding to carry out my MSc thesis at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, working on Wnt signaling with Michael Boutros and supervised by Julia Gross. As well as earlier with Lynne Yenush on signaling response to stress using budding yeast, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, and a JAE Intro summer internship, which allowed me have my first research experience in mammalian differentiation, studying blood stem cells. These types of initiatives are critical to allow access to research and should be a priority as we work to increase the diversity we find in the science environment.

I am passionate about science and I love sharing this enthusiasm. I have been involved in public outreach activities at several levels since my university years, and I will continue these efforts wherever science takes me next.

Selected Publications

  1. DevCell
    Developmental cell fate choice in neural tube progenitors employs two distinct cis-regulatory strategies
    Delás, M. J., Kalaitzis, CM, Fawzi, T, Demuth, M, Zhang, I, Stuart, H. T., Costantini, E, K, Ivanovitch., Tanaka, E. M., and Briscoe, J.
    Developmental Cell 2022
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  2. NatCellBio
    Sox2 levels regulate the chromatin occupancy of WNT mediators in epiblast progenitors responsible for vertebrate body formation
    Blassberg, R., Patel, H., Watson, T., Gouti, M., Metzis, V., Delás, M. J., and Briscoe, J.
    Nature Cell Biology 2022
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  3. CurrTopDevBio
    Repressive interactions in gene regulatory networks: When you have no other choice
    Delás, M. J., and Briscoe, J.
    Current Topics in Developmental Biology 2020
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  4. Cell Rep
    lncRNA Spehd Regulates Hematopoietic Stem and Progenitor Cells and Is Required for Multilineage Differentiation
    Delás, M. J., Jackson, B.T., Kovacevic, S., Munera Maravilla, E., Wild, S. A., Stork, E. M., Erard, N., Knott, S. R. V., and Hannon G. J.,
    Cell Reports 2019
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  5. eLife
    LncRNA requirements for mouse acute myeloid leukemia and normal differentiation
    Delás, M. J., Sabin, L. R., Dolzhenko, E., Knott, S. R. V., Munera Maravilla, E., Jackson, B. T., Wild, S. A., Kovacevic, T., Stork, E. M., Zhou, M., Erard, N., Lee, E., Kelley, D. R., Roth, M., Barbosa, I. A. M., Zuber, J., Rinn, J. L., Smith, A. D., and Hannon, G. J.
    eLife 2017
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