Pioneering Transcription Factors Wiggle Towards PluripotencyApril 24, 2015Canoes, camels, cars and catamarans have carried human pioneers far and wide; taking us to undiscovered lands to encounter unseen beauty, encouraged by the hope of fame, glory, and a lust for adventure. How pioneer transcription factors brave the inhospitable exterior of a compacted DNA-histone complex to induce transcription of tightly guarded genes is, however, […]
Human Preimplantation Embryos Go RetroviralApril 24, 2015Our genomes are littered with tales of our evolutionary past, including infections from retroviruses that have left their mark in the vast expanses of the human genome. While most of the endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) have lost their protein coding potential, a class of human specific ERVs (HERVs) still possess intact open reading frames. Inspired by […]
At Risk of Autistic Offspring? Sperm DNA Methylation May Hold the AnswerApril 23, 2015Finding the origin of complex disease is no easy task but now it seems a seminal breakthrough has occurred. Andrew Feinberg and team at the John Hopkins University Center for Epigenetics have found a DNA methylation pattern in the sperm of fathers with an increased risk of fathering autistic children that is also present in brains […]
The Differentiation Race: Not all Cells Move at the Same SpeedApril 21, 2015Christoph Bock discusses his recent paper ‘Single-Cell DNA Methylome Sequencing and Bioinformatic Inference of Epigenomic Cell-State Dynamics‘ published in Cell Reports. Epigenetic Regulation of Cell States In this first section Christoph tells us why he is interested in studying the epigenetic regulation of cell states and how his new method helps to look at the epigenetics of […]
Mass-tering the Stem Cell Reprogramming ProcessApril 15, 2015Chaotic, uncoordinated, and seemingly without rhyme or reason…no, it’s not the daily stampede towards the barista for your first coffee of the day; rather it’s the words used to describe the early stochastic phases of reprogramming differentiated cells into induced pluripotent stem cells. To bring a little order to the chaos, researchers from the laboratory […]