Dr. Maria Colomé-Tatché

Between 2005 and 2010 I did my PhD and postdoc in theoretical physics at the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics and Statistical Models (University Paris Saclay, France) and Institute of Theoretical Physics (University of Hannover, Germany). In 2010 I became a postdoctoral researcher at the Groningen Bioinformatics Center (University of Groningen, The Netherlands), where I transitioned to biology attracted by the rapid developments in the field of genetics and epigenetics. In 2013 I became a “Rosalind Franklin Fellow” at the University Medical Center Groningen. In 2016 I became a “Helmholtz Young Investigator” Group Leader at the Institute of Computational Biology (ICB) at the Helmholtz Munich, and in 2021 I became a W2 professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. 

My group works on the development of computational and theoretical approaches to quantify the dynamical properties of the epigenome. In the past, I have worked on the study of the DNA methylation inheritance patterns in experimental populations of plants to study the epigenetic basis of complex trait inheritance and to determine the rate at which epigenetic variants arise naturally. The results from these studies represented the first evidence that epigenetic alleles can be stably inherited over multiple generations in plant populations and can contribute to the heritability of complex traits. 

Currently, my group works on disentangling the interactions between the genome, the epigenome and the transcriptome that give rise to higher order cellular phenotypes. We develop computational methods to analyze single-cell epigenomic data, derive genomic signatures from single-cells, and integrate it with transcriptomics data. We have pioneered methods for detecting genomic alterations in single cells, particularly copy number variations from both DNA and epigenomic data. This work has revolutionized cancer research by enabling combined functional and genomic analysis at single-cell resolution, helping study tumor evolution and treatment responses. Our group is also involved in influential benchmarking studies.