UBER: Cross-Species, Drag-and-Drop Gene CircuitsAugust 26, 2015There’s a bit of a dirty little secret in synthetic biology – gene circuits that work great in one species often require a lot of changes to work in anything else. This is one reason so many synbio papers contain the same two key words: E. and coli. Now, a new approach called UBER (Universal […]
RiboT: Synthetic Ribosome Opens Door to Independent Genetic CodesAugust 25, 2015Synthetic biologists have made a lot of progress in developing “orthogonal” genetic systems. DNA and RNA have been made with synthetic base pairs, and cells have been coaxed to produce proteins with synthetic amino acids. This expands the genetic code beyond the standard letters used by life on Earth, which could potentially open up new […]
ChIPmentation: The Next Fast and Low-Input ChIP-seq SensationAugust 25, 2015ChIP-Seq is the bread and butter of histone and transcription factor research. It has seen countless modifications to allow it to perform under all the variables biology can throw at it, but with that specialization has come limitations to generalization. Now the methodological maestros in the lab of Christoph Bock, which brought us single-cell methylome sequencing, […]
Two Cocktails to Boost Reprogramming to NeuronsAugust 17, 2015Trendy drinks come and go, but it looks like there are a couple of new cocktails that will have some staying power within the stem cell community. In last week’s issue of Cell Stem Cell, two independent groups report in back-to-back papers the development of small molecule chemical cocktails, which enable neurons to be directly derived […]
New Insights into Puzzling Placental DNA Methylation DomainsAugust 14, 2015The human placental methylome was the first normal tissue where partially methylated domains (PMDs) were characterized, found to be developmentally dynamic, and distinct from highly methylated domains (HMDs, methylation >70%). PMDs are a large scale genomic feature with DNA methylation levels that are less than 70% but nowhere near 0% and tend to harbour neuron […]