Davide Marenduzzo

Biophysical mechanisms of chromosome organisation and transcription.

Davide Marenduzzo is a Professor of Computational Biophysics at the University of Edinburgh, within the School of Physics and Astronomy.

Davide was first trained as a particle physicist, then did his PhD and post-doctoral training in biophysics and soft matter. His current research deals mainly with models for 3D chromosome organisation and for chromatin transcription, in close collaborations with experimentalists in biology and medicine. 

portrait photo of Davide Marenduzzo
Davide Marenduzzo

Among other things, he is well known for discovering together with his team the bridging-induced attraction, a biophysical mechanism leading to the spontaneous formation of clusters of proteins associated with transcription in living cells.

Andrea Bonato, Michael Chiang, and Enrico Skoruppa (PDRAs). Ana Paulino, Ruairi' Phelan, and Achille Quarante (PhDs, all as second supervisor)


We are interested in biophysics, active matter, statistical physics and soft condensed matter physics. We have a long-standing collaboration with biologists to understand chromatin structure and dynamics, and their relation to transcription.


HiP-HoP model

Gilbert N, Marenduzzo D. Topological epigenetics: The biophysics of DNA supercoiling and its relation to transcription and genome instability. Current Opinion in Cell Biology. 2025 Feb 1;92:102448.

Chiang M, Brackley CA, Naughton C, Nozawa RS, Battaglia C, Marenduzzo D, Gilbert N. Genome-wide chromosome architecture prediction reveals biophysical principles underlying gene structure. Cell Genomics. 2024 Dec 11;4(12).

Forte G, Boteva L, Conforto F, Gilbert N, Cook PR, Marenduzzo D. Bridging condensins mediate compaction of mitotic chromosomes. Journal of Cell Biology. 2023 Nov 17;223(1):e202209113.

Brackley CA, Gilbert N, Michieletto D, Papantonis A, Pereira MC, Cook PR, Marenduzzo D. Complex small-world regulatory networks emerge from the 3D organisation of the human genome. Nature communications. 2021 Oct 1;12(1):5756.

Cook PR, Marenduzzo D. Transcription-driven genome organization: a model for chromosome structure and the regulation of gene expression tested through simulations. Nucleic acids research. 2018 Nov 2;46(19):9895-906.

Brackley CA, Taylor S, Papantonis A, Cook PR, Marenduzzo D. Nonspecific bridging-induced attraction drives clustering of DNA-binding proteins and genome organization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2013 Sep 17;110(38):E3605-11.


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