Overview

• An interdisciplinary team at EPFL identified primate-specific ZNF519 and mammalian-specific ZNF274 as key regulators of DNA replication and genome duplication timing in the cell cycle.
• Disabling ZNF519 impaired DNA replication fidelity and slowed cell proliferation, demonstrating its essential role during the synthesis phase.
• ZNF274 was shown to schedule genome segment duplication prior to mitosis, a function linked to epigenome maintenance and nuclear architecture.
• Researchers used CRISPR interference, single-cell RNA sequencing and computational genomics to map nearly two million cells and build a comprehensive atlas of human cell cycle gene expression.
• The publicly available atlas, published in Cell Genomics on June 23, 2025, provides a resource for exploring cell cycle dysregulation in diseases such as cancer.