SynBioLGDB: A Gateway for Logical BiologyFebruary 9, 2015Electrical engineering is a strong contender for the central analogy of synthetic biology. Synthetic biologists often think of electrical circuits when designing gene networks, and logic gates are central to the metaphor. Biological logic gates can be difficult to design from scratch, however, and they can’t just be bought at Radio Shack, even before it […]
Review: Crosslinking-Immunoprecipitation (CLIP) MethodsFebruary 8, 2015RNA-protein interactions are key to understanding human health and disease. Crosslinking-immunoprecipitation (CLIP) and related technologies are powerful tools for characterizing these interactions. Since their introduction in 2008 (Licatalosi et al., 2008), CLIP-based approaches have been applied to prominent RNA research fields such as HIV and cancer. Recently, Sebla Kutluay and colleagues used CLIP to characterize […]
Epigenetic Clock Goes from Analog to iWatchFebruary 6, 2015Tick tock…we all know that life is a battle against the inevitability of time. But wouldn’t it be great if you could get a real idea of how your cells are aging? It may just help make 20 the new 30, that is when it comes to your chance of death. And that’s the ambitious […]
DNMT1 Depletion Helps Hunt for Heritable MethylationFebruary 5, 2015Sometimes it takes a special kind of guy to get the job done and when the job is to keep imprinted genes differentially methylated, that guy is DNMT1. An international group of researchers led by Jacquetta Trasler in Canada set out to exploit this fact in order to identify yet unknown imprinted genomic sequences. Several […]
Keeping Tabs on Off-Target Effects of Genome EditingFebruary 5, 2015While the fashion and music tastes of the late 1980’s was rather questionable, it was a time of historic technological and societal change. Between the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the rise of the global computer network that we now call internet, a small group of researchers succeeded for the first time in generating […]