Decoding the Molecular Mechanisms of lncRNA XISTSeptember 6, 2013Fast on the heels of a major epigenetic engineering breakthrough revealing that XIST can help treat the symptoms of Down’s syndrome, Dr. Carolyn Brown (University of British Columbia) and crew sought to find out exactly what’s going on at the molecular level with this complex lncRNA. Their experimentation started with they hypothesis that “long ncRNAs […]
Stem Cell Conference Highlights TimelineSeptember 4, 2013Stem Cells are a hot topic these days. Here we provide a history of epigenetic breakthroughs in this interdisciplinary field as told through our Conference Coverage.
Genome-wide and Gene-specific Analysis of DNA MethylationSeptember 3, 2013EpiGenie recently reviewed the text Epigenetics by Jorg Tost. Here is a more in depth summary of one the chapters provided courtesy of JA Gill who is a molecular biologist at NOAA in the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, to give you a little sneak peek into what the whole book is all about: Methods for […]
One Man’s Junk DNA is Another’s Intronic microRNASeptember 3, 2013Introns have a bad rap these days. Sequestered with the rest of the (epi)genome in the term ‘junk’ DNA’; A reductionist way of describing 95% of our beloved genome as useless. But as new evidence keeps pointing out, introns and ‘non-coding’ regions actually code for most of the genomes products and/or function. In recently published […]
RRBS and 450k Arrays Face Off Over DNA Methylation AnalysisAugust 27, 2013DNA methylation has been a cornerstone of epigenetics research from the start, and the emergence of technologies that make investigation of the modification more accessible has only made the DNA methylation field even hotter. Several tools and techniques are available to assess DNA methylation levels, but two in particular, reduced representation bisulfite sequencing (RRBS) and […]