Daniel Andergassen

Research Group leader

Dr. Daniel Andergassen received his Diploma degree in Molecular Biology from the University of Vienna in 2012. He then had the privilege of pursuing his Ph.D. at CeMM under the supervision of Denise Barlow, a driving force in epigenetics, genomic imprinting, and lncRNA biology (2016). In her lab, he generated the most comprehensive map of allele-specific expression in the mouse, including the identification of all imprinted genes and X chromosome inactivation (XCI) escapees. To accomplish this, he developed a bioinformatics pipeline to detect allele-specific expression from high-throughput sequencing data.
To further explore lncRNA biology and epigenetic regulation, he joined the labs of John Rinn and Alexander Meissner as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, where he focused his research on X-linked lncRNA loci with sex-specific features that have been linked to the structure of the inactive X chromosome. In another project, he used CRISPR-Cas9 to target key epigenetic pathways in vivo, which revealed the imprinting mechanism genomewide. This approach also demonstrated that the inactive X chromosome could be reactivated in vivo.
Since 2020, he has been leading an independent junior research group at TUM, aiming to understand the impact of the non-coding genome in disease and elucidate the contribution of sex chromosomes during aging as well as in the context of sex-biased cardiovascular and pulmonary disease. Very recently, his lab discovered that the female X chromosome partially reactivates across all organs during aging, leading to higher expression of disease-associated genes in females compared to males—an epigenetic mechanism that may explain age-related sex differences in disease, independent of hormonal influences. To support this ambitious research program, he has been awarded several prestigious grants, most notably the ERC Starting Grant.