Pau’s research is focused on how eukaryotic genomes are organized within the nuclear space and on what role this organization plays in gene expression. His approach to these questions has been to study different components of the nuclear pore complex (NPC) that, besides playing a role in nucleocytoplasmic transport, has also been involved in chromatin organization, transcription, and DNA repair. His work with the nuclear pore protein, Nup98, uncovered new physical interactions between Nup98 and histone modifying complexes and epigenetic memory components. That, in turn, led him to be able to describe the role of Nup98 in Drosophila Ecdysones genes, where Nup98 plays a role in securing the transcriptional memory behavior of these genes, most likely due to chromatin architecture changes. In support of this model, he found that Nup98 promotes Ecdysone enhancer-promoter looping and establishes new physical interactions with architectural proteins upon Ecdysone induction.
Currently, Pau is investigating the impact of transcriptional memory on fly development. He is also working on defining more precisely the role of Nup98 and other nucleoporins in chromatin organization, which may be central to the oncogenic roles of nuclear pore proteins.