Our research goals aim at tackling the mechanisms and factors that impacts processes such as transcription/replication through chromatin folding. We focus our work on such structure-function relationships and analyze the potent roles of factors including histone modifiers, SMCs, insulator proteins, together with the ‘pausing’ of RNAPol2, or with the activation of DNA replication origins. One main goal is to understand how such factors help to avoid fork collisions, a major source of genomic instability.