Tutorial Fellow in Biochemistry

Tobias Warnecke

  • I’m interested in evolution at the molecular level. Over the last few years, my research has focused on the evolution and organization of chromatin, with a particular emphasis on archaea and what they can tell us about the emergence of eukaryotic genome regulation. But we’ve also explored a range of other phenomena, including red blood cell sickling in deer and the role of chaperones in buffering deleterious mutations at the RNA and protein level.
  • I love the tutorial system and the opportunities it affords for productive intellectual meandering, from classic literature to the latest research, going deep or zig-zagging across subject boundaries.
  • We recently discovered that some bacteria use histone proteins (long thought to be exclusive to eukaryotes and archaea) as major building blocks for their chromatin. We are now looking to unravel what histones do in these bacteria, including in the predatory bacterium Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus.

Teaching

I am the Tutorial Fellow for Biochemistry and therefore oversee and organize teaching of all undergraduate biochemistry students at Trinity. The teaching I do myself is focused on the interactions of proteins and nucleic acids, especially in the context of genome regulation.

My teaching for the Department of Biochemistry will focus on genome regulation, computational approaches to biological problems, including large-scale data analysis, and molecular evolution.

I regularly supervise and co-supervise graduate students in the broad areas of microbiology and genome evolution.

Research

The work of my group over the last few years has focused on chromatin and its evolution. Using a combination of computational and experimental approaches, we have looked into the fundamental differences (and sometimes surprising similarities) between eukaryotes, bacteria, and archaea in how they organize their DNA to safeguard and orchestrate genome activity. In particular, we have studied archaeal chromatin to understand a number of fundamental questions in chromatin biology, including why global chromatinization evolved in the first place (Hocher et al. 2022 Nat Microbiol), when modular control of chromatin via histone variants evolved (Stevens et al. 2020 PNAS), and whether specific adaptations are required for global chromatinization (Rojec et al. 2019 eLife).

We combine phylogenomics, functional genomics and genome engineering approaches, with classic biochemistry, genetics, structural modelling and machine learning to answer a constantly evolving panoply of questions.  

Selected Publications

Hocher A, Borrel G, Fadhlaoui K, Brugère JF, Gribaldo S, Warnecke T (2022) ‘Growth temperature and chromatinization in archaea’ Nature Microbiology 7(11):1932-1942

Stevens KM, Swadling JB, Hocher A, Bang C, Gribaldo S, Schmitz-Streit RA, Warnecke T (2020) ‘Histone variants in archaea and the evolution of combinatorial chromatin complexity’ PNAS 117(52):33384-33395

Rojec M, Hocher A, Stevens KM, Merkenschlager M, Warnecke T (2019) ‘Chromatinization of Escherichia coli with archaeal histones’ eLife 8:52542

Rudan M, Bou Dib P, Musa M, Kanunnikau M, Sobočanec S, Rueda D, Warnecke T, Kriško A (2018) ‘Normal mitochondrial function in Saccharomyces cerevisiae has become dependent on inefficient splicing’ eLife 7:e35330

Esin A, Bergendahl LT, Savolainen V, Marsh JA, Warnecke T (2018) ‘The genetic basis and evolution of red blood cell sickling in deer’ Nature Ecology and Evolution 2:367-376

Subjects
Biochemistry
Dr Warnecke
tobias.warnecke@trinity.ox.ac.uk
Research Group

Growth temperature and chromatinization in archaea

I love biological curiosities, the mutants of natural history, which I believe can reveal as much about how biological systems work as precise experimental manipulation.