Colin Logie

Born in Brussels, Colin Logie studied Genetics and Molecular Biology at Glasgow University, graduating in 1991. For his PhD, he built the first ligand-regulated site-specific DNA recombinases with A. Francis Stewart at the EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany, in 1995. He went on to engineer nucleosome remodelling assays during his postdoc with Craig L. Peterson at the UMASS, Worcester, MA, USA. Since 1999 he has conducted academic research on chromatin remodelling complexes at the Radboud University Science Faculty Molecular Biology Department (RIMLS), Nijmegen, The Netherlands, which is a joint venture with the Medical Faculty of the Radboud University. For the past seven years he has focused on human blood monocytes, and the cell types they can differentiate into such as macrophages, dendritic cells, and osteoclasts as an experimental research system. He is interested in the systems-wide integration of nuclear receptor action in health and disease. Through the COST-funded Gene Regulation Ensemble Effort for the Knowledge Commons (GREEKC) he became a member of the Gene Ontology Consortium. There he participates in setting the stage for computer-readable gene annotation for the 21st century, with a focus on ‘breaking through the DNA wall’ so as to enable automated reasoning through cellular signal transduction all the way to the trans-acting sequence-specific DNA binding transcription factors and their co-factors that act in concert on cis-acting chromosomal DNA sequences to permit cell type- and environmentally-conditioned gene transcription regulation. This includes the concepts of epigenetic memory embodied by post-replicational DNA modifications such as DNA methylation, nucleosome-borne epigenetic information in the form of histone post-translational modifications, nucleosome remodelling, and the positioning of nucleosomes along the length of chromosomes. Also chromatin domain boundaries have been a focus of his recent research. Over the years, his research has been funded by EMBL, Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP), the Dutch Research Organisation NWO, the European Science Foundation (ESF), and indirectly by the European Research Council (ERC) with Hendrik G. Stunnenberg and Stefano Ceri.