GC Content and CpG Islands Keep Chromatin Open for TranscriptionOctober 30, 2012The word “island” conjures up images of a tropical paradise with a sandy beach and a sunny sky—a nice place to hang out. In a similar way, CpG islands turn out to be nice places for Pol II to hang out without worrying about pesky nucleosomes getting in the way, according to researchers in France […]
5-hmC Sequencing on a BudgetOctober 30, 2012Whether you’re the head of a lab, household, or leading a country, budgets are a reality. Like those old jeans you can’t seem to donate, they seem to get tighter every year. So when slick, new methods surface that tackle some tough challenges like single nucleotide resolution 5-hmC profiling, researchers’ excitement is quickly tempered by […]
Three Ways to Get Intimate with Epigenetic MarksOctober 24, 2012The days of dealing with regional estimates of epigenetic marks like histone modifications and DNA methylation are just about behind us. That’s right, the maps that lie ahead will be less Thomas Guide and more GPS. Drs. Gabriel Zentner and Steve Henikoff recently took some time off from being all-star cancer researchers and pulled together […]
Epigenetic Regulators (miRNAs, lncRNAs) Get Regulated EpigeneticallyOctober 20, 2012With Halloween coming up, perhaps it is fitting that the authors of two recent papers describe a “tangled web” of epigenetic regulations. In one paper, researchers suggest that DNA methylation and perhaps other epigenetic modifications disrupt long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) activity. In the other paper, a different team shows that DNAm messes with the miRNA […]
DNA Hypermethylation of CpG Islands Doesn’t Contribute to Cancer Progression?October 9, 2012And in another example of turning conventional wisdom on its head, researchers from Scotland report that aberrant DNA hypermethylation of CpG island (CGI) promoters does not contribute to cancer development via silencing. Generally, those genes are already repressed before cancer even starts. Researchers have noticed for a long time that many genes’ CGI promoters are […]