First person – Nuno Martins, Fernanda Cisneros-Soberanis and Elisa Pesenti

Abstract

ABSTRACT First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Nuno Martins, Fernanda Cisneros-Soberani and Elisa Pesenti are co-first authors on ‘H3K9me3 maintenance on a human artificial chromosome is required for segregation but not centromere epigenetic memory’, published in JCS. Nuno conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in William C. Earnshaw's lab at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh, UK. He is now a postdoc in the lab of Ting Wu at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA, where his research interests lie in the structural and dynamic chromatin regulation of the more mysterious regions of the cell nucleus, such as centromeres, repetitive elements and nucleoli. Fernanda conducted the research described in this article while a postdoc in William C. Earnshaw's lab. She is now an Investigadora en Ciencias Médicas in the lab of Luis Alonso Herrera at Instituto Nacional de Cancerología, México City, México, investigating the transcriptional regulation of microRNAs in breast cancer. Elisa is a postdoc/lab manager in the lab of William C. Earnshaw and is interested in developing human artificial chromosomes (HACs) by applying molecular and synthetic biology techniques to study chromosome segregation and epigenetics in human cells.