Friedrich Miescher Prize 2007 awarded to Dirk Schübeler at the FMI, Basel

29-Jan-2007

The Swiss Society for biochemistry has awarded the Friedrich Miescher Prize 2007 worth CHF 20'000 to Dr. Dirk Schübeler of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel. The prize is awarded each year by a jury of scientists from Swiss universities for outstanding achievements in the field of biochemistry. The prize-winner must be under 40 years of age and be of Swiss nationality or to have carried out the award-winning work in Switzerland.

Dr. Schübeler received his PhD from the Technical University and the Society for Biotechnology Research in Braunschweig, Germany. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, Dirk came to the FMI as a research group leader in epigenetics in 2003. In 2006, he was the recipient of an award under the EMBO Young Investigator Programme.

In the course of his career, Dirk Schübeler has made major contributions to the understanding of the histone code and how it is implemented on a genome-wide scale, most notably by implementing highly rigorous and innovative approaches to the evaluation of "ChIP on chip" data. He uses either chromatin immunoprecipitation or precipitation of methylated DNA marks, and examines the distribution of the given mark on a genome-wide array of promoters and genes or, in the case of Drosophila, on entire chromosomes.

The research group at the FMI led by Dirk Schübeler devised a novel method that produces DNA methylation profiles simultaneously at both genome-wide and locus-specific levels. They used it to provide the first epigenomic map of DNA methylation in the human genome in both normal and transformed cells (Weber et al. Nature Genetics 37:853-862, 2005). The method combines an immunocapturing approach to enrich methylated DNA (methylated DNA immunoprecipitation, MeDIP) with detection by DNA microarray using whole-genome and promoter-specific arrays (array based comparative genomic hybridisation, array CGH). As enrichment by MeDIP is dose dependent, the method can be used to quantify the extent of methylation of a given sequence and introduces a new standard for future epigenome analysis.

Together their findings revised the simple model that DNA methylation leads to heterochromatinisation and instead suggested a more complex, context-dependent function in fine tuning transcription. Studying epigenetic alterations in colon cancer, the Schübeler group reported dramatic changes in DNA methylation in transformed compared with normal cells. The differences suggest a localised and not global misregulation. Furthermore, cancer-specific hypomethylation occurred preferentially in gene-poor regions. Studying 6000 promoters in detail, Dirk Schübeler and co-workers identified several novel genes that are epigenetically misregulated in cancer, all of which are putative disease markers as well as potential therapeutic targets.

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