A Crash Course in Folate, Nutrition, and DNA Methylation Regulation with Dr. Patrick StoverOctober 10, 2013Dr. Patrick Stover, PhD, the Director of the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University, provides a great overview of the key role of folate in one-carbon metabolism, and DNA methylation in nutrition. Folate, Nutrition, and DNA Methylation Regulation There’s a long history in the whole field of folate metabolism, one-carbon metabolism, that outcomes […]
R-Loops and GC-skew Predicts Epigenetic Effects of CpG IslandsOctober 9, 2013With the EpiGenie Fortune Telling Machine in the shop most of the time, it’s pretty difficult for us to predict much of anything. (Yeah, we didn’t see the whole ‘twerking’ phenomenon coming either!) But some enterprising researchers have developed a way to classify and predict the epigenetic and transcriptional activities of various promoter regions based […]
Inducible Models Breathe New Life into Epigenetic Inheritance StudiesOctober 8, 2013Food, toxins, and stress can all have enormous effects on the epigenome, but pinning down the true epigenetic mechanisms at work is the tricky part. While it’s been difficult to determine mechanisms of action in standard animal models, new ones have been developed using Tetracyline-induced systems, that make it much simpler to tease out how […]
Is Cancer an Epigenomic Disease?October 7, 2013Discovering what ‘causes’ cancer has been a goal as elusive as hitting the Lottery by playing only the numbers in your birthdate. To complicate matters, most cases are unique events within themselves, adding a layer of heterogeneity that leads to even more hair-pulling frustration among researchers. However, cutting edge research has now revealed a possible […]
SNPs, Nutrition, and DNA Methylation with Dr. Steven ZeiselOctober 4, 2013Dr. Steven Zeisel discusses the intersection of genetics and epigenetics in nutrition. SNPs, Nutrition, and DNA Methylation Well, we think that there are a number of genetic variants, single nucleotide polymorphisms. I’ll call them SNPs. These SNPs are extremely common in one carbon metabolism, especially among Caucasians. And we are reporting that these SNPs […]