24 March 2025 – Tuncay Baubec knew at high school in Austria that he wanted a career in the life sciences. “Biology was my favourite subject at school,” he says. After a PhD in Vienna and an EMBO-funded postdoctoral position in Basel, Baubec started his own group at University of Zurich and later moved to Utrecht University in the Netherlands where he is Chair of Genome Biology & Epigenetics.
“You have to decide on a certain research direction, and for me it was epigenetic modifications because sometimes they don’t obey the underlying DNA sequence,” he says. “For the last 15 to 20 years I’ve been working on these modifications and trying to understand how they regulate genes in different organisms from plants to animals. And I still find it fascinating!”
His group seeks to develop a comprehensive view on how chromatin modifications and proteins influence each other. By using synthetic approaches to break proteins into small pieces, the group can systematically study how each segment interacts with chromatin modifications along the genome.
“We’re trying to break this down to the smallest units that regulate binding of a protein to the genome, meaning the domains of the protein that recognize chromatin modifications or a DNA sequence of the genome,” Baubec says. “We then put them back to together to generate synthetic proteins that allow us to probe or modify chromatin and study how this influences transcription.”
Baubec says his EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship was instrumental in furthering his career. “It allowed me the freedom to decide what I wanted to do, and the training was also very helpful,” he says. “We had group leader training for postdoctoral researchers which prepared me to run a lab.”
Selected as an EMBO Young Investigator in 2020, Baubec says the support from EMBO has helped develop and maintain important networking and collaboration opportunities. “The network is very helpful, meeting other researchers at the same level and exchanging research leading to collaboration. I can only be very grateful about both the Fellowship and Young Investigator programmes, and they are highly recommended for everyone,” Baubec says.
