5-hmC Sequencing on a BudgetOctober 30, 2012Whether you’re the head of a lab, household, or leading a country, budgets are a reality. Like those old jeans you can’t seem to donate, they seem to get tighter every year. So when slick, new methods surface that tackle some tough challenges like single nucleotide resolution 5-hmC profiling, researchers’ excitement is quickly tempered by […]
Three Ways to Get Intimate with Epigenetic MarksOctober 24, 2012The days of dealing with regional estimates of epigenetic marks like histone modifications and DNA methylation are just about behind us. That’s right, the maps that lie ahead will be less Thomas Guide and more GPS. Drs. Gabriel Zentner and Steve Henikoff recently took some time off from being all-star cancer researchers and pulled together […]
Guide: Key Restriction Enzymes for DNA Methylation AnalysisOctober 22, 2012Enzymes and, in particular, restriction enzymes have been invaluable assistants in the laboratory for decades, so it is not surprising that they have been instrumental in driving discoveries in epigenetics-related research as well. Enzymatic manipulation of methylated DNA has seen a tremendous amount of innovation over the last 30 years, making these DNA modifying enzymes great […]
Natural Antisense Transcripts within PseudogenesOctober 20, 2012EpiGenie recently reviewed the epigenetic text Non-Coding RNAs and Epigenetic Regulation of Gene Expression by Kevin Morris. To give you a little taste of the material covered in the book, here is a summary of one of the chapters: Natural Antisense Transcripts within Pseudogenes: An EST Survey by Enrique M. Muro and Miguel A. Andrade-Navarro […]
Epigenetic Regulators (miRNAs, lncRNAs) Get Regulated EpigeneticallyOctober 20, 2012With Halloween coming up, perhaps it is fitting that the authors of two recent papers describe a “tangled web” of epigenetic regulations. In one paper, researchers suggest that DNA methylation and perhaps other epigenetic modifications disrupt long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) activity. In the other paper, a different team shows that DNAm messes with the miRNA […]