Playing Hide-and-Seek with Yeast

I like to think of the late 80s and early 90s as extremely exciting times in my career. I was working as a visiting graduate student in Rick Gaber’s laboratory at Northwestern University, and some of the work I did during those years turned out to be seminal for the then-fledgling field of epigenetics. Together with other scientists, I provided long-awaited in vivo functional evidence for a model proposed by Vince Allfrey in 1964, postulating that post-translational modifications of histones, particularly acetylation and deacetylation, are crucial for transcriptional regulation.