Sweet Success: Is a Viable Stem Cell Treatment for Diabetes in the Works?October 18, 2014Could we be near a bona fide treatment for a disease which affects over 300 million people? A remedy for the Case of the Mondays perhaps? No, it’s better than that; researchers from Harvard University believe that they might have uncovered a new strategy to replace lost insulin secreting cells of the pancreas (b cells) […]
Natural Disasters Impact DNA MethylationOctober 16, 2014As Polar Vortex II approaches, you’ll be interested in a recent study highlighting the impact of environment stressors on the epigenome. Prenatal maternal stress exposure is known to adversely affect offspring in a number of ways, depending on the nature of the exposure, but is typically studied in common exposures like diet, alcohol, and lead. But this has left the […]
Epigram: Predicting the Human Epigenome from DNA MotifsOctober 16, 2014There’s no denying the power of technology in our lives, whether it be your latest and greatest iPhone bending in your pocket or it be getting the technology to do something more useful, like predict the entire epigenome and how it functions in the regulation of gene expression. We’ve always loved a good tool and/or […]
Enhancers Share their Genome Editing Turn Ons (and Offs)October 13, 2014Tired of not knowing what really turns an enhancer on? You’re not alone, but luckily an inquisitive team of researchers out of Cambridge spent some serious time targeting enhancers by throwing some genome editing wizardry at them. The team, led by Pentao Liu, systematically compared how the TALE effectors and CRISPR targeting tools fare in […]
More Cleavage: CRISPR Cas9 Can Target RNA TooOctober 11, 2014Targeted genome editing using CRISPR/Cas9 has been on the forefront of genome editing research lately. The Cas9 system is effective, efficient, and reliably specific in its approach to cleavage of nucleotides of interest. The catalytic activity of Cas9 depends on its ability to recognize short DNA sequences called the protospacer adjacent motif (PAM). Although it’s […]