JUSTINE MARSOLIER

Since 2017, in the laboratory of Céline Vallot, I am working on chemotolerance in triple negative breast cancer. We demonstrated that the repressive histone mark H3K27me3 is a determinant of cell fate at the onset of chemotherapy exposure, monitoring epigenomes, transcriptomes and lineages with single-cell resolution. We show that the persister expression program is primed with both H3K4me3 and H3K27me3 in unchallenged cells, H3K27me3 being the lock to its transcriptional activation. We further establish that H3K27me3 controls cell fate upon chemotherapy exposure. Our results highlight how chromatin landscapes shape the potential of cancer cells to respond to initial therapeutic insult.