Upcycling the Epigenome in the Brain Help Neurons Stay in TouchMay 5, 2015Upcycling is the latest of many green crazes where people keep hold of old furniture and instead of throwing it away, they repurpose it to give new life. It seems that the brain might be doing the same for methylation. It’s been a long held belief that DNA methylation is fixed in differentiated cells, yet there is […]
Finding Epimutations in the Genome HaystackApril 30, 2015Trying to identify DNA methylation mutations with current technologies usually requires a lot of cells, making it a lot like hunting for a needle in a haystack. Getting down to looking at single cells is becoming possible, but requires you to look at the whole genome, making the hunt for epimutations difficult. Recent work from Silvia […]
Human Preimplantation Embryos Go RetroviralApril 24, 2015Our genomes are littered with tales of our evolutionary past, including infections from retroviruses that have left their mark in the vast expanses of the human genome. While most of the endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) have lost their protein coding potential, a class of human specific ERVs (HERVs) still possess intact open reading frames. Inspired by […]
At Risk of Autistic Offspring? Sperm DNA Methylation May Hold the AnswerApril 23, 2015Finding the origin of complex disease is no easy task but now it seems a seminal breakthrough has occurred. Andrew Feinberg and team at the John Hopkins University Center for Epigenetics have found a DNA methylation pattern in the sperm of fathers with an increased risk of fathering autistic children that is also present in brains […]
The Differentiation Race: Not all Cells Move at the Same SpeedApril 21, 2015Christoph Bock discusses his recent paper ‘Single-Cell DNA Methylome Sequencing and Bioinformatic Inference of Epigenomic Cell-State Dynamics‘ published in Cell Reports. Epigenetic Regulation of Cell States In this first section Christoph tells us why he is interested in studying the epigenetic regulation of cell states and how his new method helps to look at the epigenetics of […]