Stem Cell Scientists Use Cell Reprogramming Techniques to Study AgingOctober 22, 2015“Work harder, eat less, and, I’m begging you, get a haircut!” A face-to-face meeting between a younger and an older version of yourself would surely be filled with sage advice on how to live life and grow old gracefully. Many scientists wish to recreate such a meeting between young and old neurons to study aging and […]
Stem Cell-Derived Kidney Organoids Take a Big Step ForwardOctober 22, 2015Much like finding water on Mars and the fight to be the next President of the USA, pluripotent stem cell-derived mini-organs (or organoids) are big news at the moment. A recent study, featured here at EpiGenie, used a brain organoid generated from patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to unravel the molecular causes behind autism. […]
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 […]