Affiliation: University of Naples Federico II (Italy)
Keywords: Epigenetic, system biology, sex differences, X chromosome inactivation, immunity

Full profile: Dr Cantone is an expert of transcription regulatory networks and epigenetics. She has done PhD studies in the field of system and synthetic biology establishing one of the first synthetic network in eukaryotes in order to benchmark computational tools aimed to reconstruct and predict the structure of gene regulatory networks (Cantone et al., Cell 2009). For her postdoc she was awarded Marie-Curie, EMBO and HFSP long-term fellowships to investigate epigenetic reprogramming. In particular, she has used X chromosome inactivation to disentangle the relationship between different steps of chromatin remodeling and gene reactivation. She discovered that reactivation of gene loci along the human inactive X chromosome (Xi) can occurr ahead/during mitosis upon the de-localization of XIST RNA and is conined to a specific set of loci (Cantone et al., Nature Comm 2016). In addition, she established a method for allele-specific RNA sequencing in clonal populations to investigate the extent of Xi gene reactivation and showed that that Xi gene loci have an intrinsic susceptibility to activation/reactivation partly depedend upon the specific chromatin context. Notably she suggested that stochastic transcriptional events can arise along the human Xi in somatic cells ahead of reprogramming and be stabilized throughout cell divisions in rare clonal population (Cantone* et al., Genome Biol, 2017 – corresponding author). She had a career break due to maternity (3 months) and sickness from Oct 2016- Sept 2019. Since October 2019, she has established her independent group at the University of Naples Federico II thanks to a career development award of the Italian Foundation for Multiple Sclerosis (FISM). Dr Cantone has now established her independent group investigating the epigenetic mechanisms of sex differences in autoimmunity and the possible role of Xi gene escape/reactivation. Her lab makes use of single cell genomic and imaging approaches combined with computational tools to dissect both chromatin-mediated and system control (i.e. network structure) in epigenetic inheritance. Her team recently reported sex-differences in development of mice exposed to environmental contaminants containing heavy metals and suggested to determine transgenerational inheritance in human (Li et al., Adv Mater 2023).