Gene regulation through mitosis

The idea that cells remember past states to prepare their future endeavors has split into two parallel languages that rarely converse. On one side, chromatin epigenetics defines inheritance through the material continuity of molecular marks such as histone modifications, which can be faithfully propagated through replication and mitosis. On the other, regulatory network epigenetics views memory as an emergent property of circuit dynamics such as feedback loops, attractor states, and gene modules that retain information across cell generations. Each framework has achieved remarkable depth and explanatory power, profoundly shaping our understanding of developmental biology. Yet, their integration remains incomplete: chromatin biologists rarely model regulatory feedback beyond molecular propagation, while systems biologists often treat chromatin as a static scaffold rather than an active component encoding memory. I will review our work on chromatin biology and regulatory networks in mouse ES cells, focusing on mitotic bookmarking by TFs as an anchoring point between chromatin- and system-levels epigenetics.