This Is the Methylome that Alzheimer’s BuiltSeptember 9, 2019“This is the House that Jack Built” is a popular and beloved children’s rhyme. But if children’s rhymes were written by scientists instead, it might look something like this: There’s an oxidation reaction on a methyl group, on a carbon in a cytosine, in a region of a gene, in the genome of a neuron, […]
Methylation Prevents Young Transposable Elements From LINE-1 Dancing Through the Neural GenomeAugust 13, 2019Whether you’re a fan of nightclubs, speakeasys, or honkey-tonks, you may have noticed that the population on the dance floor seems to get younger every year. Maybe you’re just getting older, or maybe today’s youth are getting better at getting around the rules. Like bouncers at a bar, developing cells have DNA methylation to keep […]
LADL-ing Up a New Optoepigenetic Chromatin Looping TechniqueAugust 12, 2019For your daily serving of epigenetics brain food, look no further than the entwined spaghetti-like chromatin. Although it may look like a bowl full of chaos, there are distinct domains and long-range genomic interactions that function in a variety of regulatory roles. A team at the University of Pennsylvania (USA) led by Jennifer Phillips-Cremins and […]
ChIP 101: Beginner’s Guide to ChIP AssaysJuly 24, 2019Become a ChIP Assay Expert! The chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assay is one of the best ways to study the association of DNA-binding proteins with chromatin and the localization of histone modifications throughout the genome. But ChIP assays take time to master. Our friends at Active Motif have put together this free ChIP 101 eBook that […]
SMARCA2 Variants Leave a Domain-Specific DNA Methylation Signature in Neurodevelopmental DisordersJuly 16, 2019Our signatures are unique marks that let people know where we’ve been. It turns out that epigenetic modifiers leave their own signatures on the genome. There are between 300-400 proteins that regulate the epigenome, including readers, writers, & erasers of histone marks as well as chromatin remodelers. Genetic variants in the epigenes that encode these […]
