Date: 9 April 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Venue: Mrs Chen Yang Foo Oi Telemedicine Centre, 2/F, William M.W. Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Host: Professor Michael Hӓusser

Andrew Hutchins is a combined experimental and computational biologist interested in embryonic development and complex human diseases which he explores using human stem cells. Originally from the UK, where he earned his PhD from the University of East Anglia in 2004, Andrew has been in Asia for over two decades. First, working on stem cells at the Genome Institute of Singapore (2004-2010), before moving to Osaka University in Japan (2010-2013), to study the immune system. In 2013, he came to China, first to the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, in Guangzhou, before taking up a faculty position at the Southern University of Science and Technology in 2016. To date he has published 88 manuscripts, including leading studies in Nature Cell Biology, Cell Stem Cell, Nature Communications, and Genome Biology.

Embryogenesis is marked by an open and accessible chromatin state that becomes progressively restricted during development. Genes require precise epigenetic control to be active, but how totipotent genes are expressed in this open, accessible chromatin state remains unclear. Here, we show that disruptions in the nuclear matrix cause primed hPSCs to spontaneously convert to a naïve-like earlier embryonic state. This process is driven by relaxing epigenetic control at nuclear matrix attachment sites through the regulation of HNRNPU and MATR3. We go on to show that HNRNPU at least partially affects this through the BAF complex to impair totipotency by regulating nucleosome phasing at totipotent-specific genes. Finally, I will show our findings on how SALL2 modulates bivalent chromatin to permanently lock developing embryonic cells into a trophectoderm cell fate. Together these findings suggest that totipotent genes can tolerate open dephased nucleosomes. However, at the transition to pluripotency, the BAF complex restores nucleosome phasing, shifting gene expression from a totipotent to a pluripotent program. Later, the establishment and then resolution of bivalent chromatin permanently locks cells into somatic and extraembryonic cell fates. This work supports a general model of the nucleus as being relaxed early in development, followed by a compacted bivalent epigenetic state that is lost in later development.