A TAD Closer to Understanding 3D Chromatin StructureDecember 15, 2015Interview with Dr. Jennifer Phillips-Cremins at Keystone Symposia’s  Precision Genome Engineering and Synthetic Biology. My lab is really focused on understanding the epigenetic mechanisms that regulate early brain development. And the, sort of traditional way of studying epigenetic marks, is to zoom in and really focus on a particular modification at a precise location in […]
Directed Evolution in Synthetic Biology with Dr. Andrew EllingtonDecember 12, 2015Interview with Dr. Andrew Ellington at Keystone Symposia’s Precision Genome Engineering and Synthetic Biology: Designing Genomes and Pathways Parts, Circuits, and Systems So in directed evolution, what you’re generally trying to do is to optimize function. And that can mean a lot of different things. But if we keep within the synthetic biology paradigm, we […]
Automating Pluripotent Stem Cell Culture – The Rise of the Robots?December 4, 2015They help cook dinner, clean the dishes, and sweep up afterward. They also build our cars, help us explore space, and now they may be on the verge of aiding in highly complex tasks in the laboratory. In particular, robot-based automation is being explored as a means to enhance efficiency in laboratories studying pluripotent stem […]
Epigenetic Diversity Teams Up with Genetics to Explain Complex PhenotypesDecember 4, 2015If epigenetics has taught us anything, it’s that genes are not our destiny. Even though aberrant patterns of epigenetic marks have been caught at the scene of the crime in many disease states, we know relatively little about their natural variation and how this influences human health. That may be about to change however with […]
DNA Methylation and SNPs Interact to Shape Neurodevelopment and Schizophrenia RiskDecember 4, 2015While epigenetic marks drive traits on their own, their complex influence on phenotype can also be caught in an intimate tango with underlying sequence. One way to characterize this association is by studying DNA methylation quantitative trait loci (mQTLs), which are SNPs in the genome that influence DNA methylation. Previously, the Lab of Jonathan Mill […]