Spatiotemporal patterns of active epigenetic turnover Olmeda, Fabrizio Gupta, Misha Bektas, Onurcan Rulands, Steffen ddc:570 DNA methylation is a primary layer of epigenetic modification that plays a pivotal role in the regulation of development, aging, and cancer. The concurrent activity of opposing enzymes that mediate DNA methylation and demethylation gives rise to a biochemical cycle and active turnover of DNA methylation. While the ensuing biochemical oscillations have been implicated in the regulation of cell differentiation, their functional role and spatiotemporal dynamics are unknown. In this work, we demonstrate that chromatin-mediated coupling between these local biochemical cycles can lead to the emergence of phase-locked domains, regions of locally synchronized turnover activity, whose coarsening is arrested by genomic heterogeneity. We introduce a minimal model based on stochastic oscillators with constrained long-range and nonreciprocal interactions, shaped by the local chromatin organization. Through a combination of analytical theory and stochastic simulations, we predict both the degree of synchronization and the typical size of emergent phase-locked domains. We qualitatively test these predictions using single-cell sequencing data. Our results show that DNA methylation turnover exhibits surprisingly rich spatiotemporal patterns that may be used by cells to control cell differentiation. American Physical Society 2026 info:eu-repo/semantics/article doc-type:article text http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_2df8fbb1 https://research-explorer.ista.ac.at/record/21275 https://research-explorer.ista.ac.at/download/21275/21351 Olmeda F, Gupta M, Bektas O, Rulands S. Spatiotemporal patterns of active epigenetic turnover. <i>PRX Life</i>. 2026;4. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/89bj-79g5">10.1103/89bj-79g5</a> eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1103/89bj-79g5 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/e-issn/2835-8279 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess