Single Cell “Drop ChIP” Reveals Epigenetic Heterogeneity in Cell PopulationsOctober 22, 2015Being average isn’t all that bad, but it’s far from good. Since its very beginning, chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) has been plagued with the problem of averages: chromatin profiles based on ChIP data are an average of the many thousands of cells required to perform this experiment. This gives us a rough overview of the chromatin […]
Validating GWAS with Epigenome EditingOctober 10, 2015GWASs (genome-wide association studies) have found a lot of genetic variants associated with various traits and diseases. But GWASs suffer from that old weakness, the mantra of every good scientist: correlation does not imply causation. The problem gets even worse when you find out most GWAS variants are in non-coding regions of DNA, meaning they […]
MicroRNA Isoforms Distinguish Between Breast Cancer SubtypesOctober 6, 2015Much like the early explorers who set out to find a new trade route to Asia and accidentally stumbled across the Americas, researchers mapping the transcriptome have come across some big surprises. Recently, Isidore Rigoutsos’s lab showed that the expression of microRNA isoforms (called ‘isomiRs’) and tRNAs depends on sex, population, and race. Now, this […]
Gene Circuits that Sense and Respond to DNAOctober 6, 2015Synthetic biology has gone through a sequence-specific revolution recently, with CRISPR-cas leading the charge of systems that can detect any DNA sequence of interest. But these techniques have a key limitation: they can only respond locally with one action – cutting, activating, or repressing – at that particular DNA molecule. This is like giving Paul […]
Stressed Nucleosomes Linked to DepressionOctober 6, 2015Have you ever felt stressed and even depressed? Well, a new study linking stress-induced depressive behaviors to changes in nucleosome positioning suggests that in order to relax yourself, you may first need to relax your chromatin. Susceptibility to major depressive disorder (MDD) depends on genetic variability but also on environmental factors such as a stressful […]
