Developmental Windows: Dutch Hunger WinterDecember 2, 2014Famine is never a good thing, particularly if you’re a developing fetus. And while the role of maternal diet in fetal programming is nothing new to the world of DNA methylation, there’s still a lot to be learned about the subtle variations. When it comes to growth and metabolism, timing of the environmental exposure appears is important, […]
DNMTs Divide Their Dynamic DNA Methylation LabourNovember 27, 2014Splitting up work amongst the team is always a sound strategy for success. We’ve seen that the TET family likes to divide it’s labour and now, not so suprisingly, the ever so famous DNA methyltransferases have also been caught working smart. Researchers from the Center for Individualized Medicine at the Mayo Clinic used acute and combined depletions […]
A New Methylation Signature: CpG Ravines as a CpG Island Sub-TypeNovember 13, 2014Islands and shores are always on the mind at this time of the year, but just because winter is coming doesn’t mean we need to put the rest of the CpGenome on the shelf. CpG Shores might be the regulatory master of CpG Islands but new features keep emerging, like CpG Canyons, and now a new sub-type of CpG Islands is coming […]
In the Epitranscriptome Clusters of Co-Methylation Define m6A’s FunctionNovember 13, 2014Lately, at the EpiGenie HQ, we’ve had our mind on methylation and our money on RNA. Not just limited to DNA or Cytosine, we’ve seen that N6-methyladenosine (m6A) is a highly dynamic mark in RNA that has a critical role in stem cell differentiation. Now researchers from the Northwestern Polytechnical University in China have set out to find how m6A dynamics work on […]
in vivo CRISPR Takes Aim at Key DNA Methylation Players in the BrainOctober 31, 2014Adding to the ever growing potential of genome editing, one of the latest breakthroughs from the lab of Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard puts CRISPR/Cas9 to the test with an interesting research trifecta of: in vivo genome editing focused on the brain genome editing that targeted DNA methylation machinery including key readers and writers. both […]