Direct Reprogramming of Neural Stem Cells – A Step Closer to the Clinic?November 18, 2014“Well there goes another couple of thousand brain cells…” – a common thought after a beer, a glass of wine, or an hour or so of television, or maybe more if it’s reality TV. But can we replace these lost cells? Millions of college kids would like to, but there’s also a long list of […]
CRISPR and Stem Cells Team Up Against HIVNovember 17, 2014To this day Timothy Ray Brown, otherwise known as the Berlin Patient, is the only person cured after infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The cure came in a fortuitous form; a stem cell transplant used to treat his leukemia came from a donor with natural resistant to HIV. Soon after, researchers discovered that […]
Coffee Gets Your Baby’s Heart Going…the Wrong WayNovember 13, 2014There’s no denying the power of coffee, it seems that without it humanity wouldn’t have the concentration or energy needed to tackle the complexities of the epigenome. But as researchers from the University of Florida show, with consumption comes responsibility and a molecule powerful enough to help you complete the 180 from bed to breakfast, may […]
A New Methylation Signature: CpG Ravines as a CpG Island Sub-TypeNovember 13, 2014Islands and shores are always on the mind at this time of the year, but just because winter is coming doesn’t mean we need to put the rest of the CpGenome on the shelf. CpG Shores might be the regulatory master of CpG Islands but new features keep emerging, like CpG Canyons, and now a new sub-type of CpG Islands is coming […]
In the Epitranscriptome Clusters of Co-Methylation Define m6A’s FunctionNovember 13, 2014Lately, at the EpiGenie HQ, we’ve had our mind on methylation and our money on RNA. Not just limited to DNA or Cytosine, we’ve seen that N6-methyladenosine (m6A) is a highly dynamic mark in RNA that has a critical role in stem cell differentiation. Now researchers from the Northwestern Polytechnical University in China have set out to find how m6A dynamics work on […]