Single Tube DNAm Analysis. Better Than Sliced Bread?April 6, 2010Tired of performing DNA extractions, bisulfite conversions, and PCR in three separate reactions? Is the sweet smell of phenol not helping you out with the opposite sex? Then, you’ll love DNA methylation analysis using methylation on beads (MOB)! Although it may sound like the stuff of infomercials, a team at Johns Hopkins University really found […]
Breaking Down miRNA MicroarraysApril 6, 2010As analysis of miRNAs becomes increasingly popular, the resulting flood of microarray products out there for miRNA profiling is enough to make your head spin. So how do you decide which ones to use? If you’ve been stressing over that question, you’ll be happy to know that some good folks at Cambridge Research Institute and […]
Transcription Enhancers Have an Oprah MomentMarch 30, 2010Not to get all “Oprah”, but sometimes, you need to let go of unstable elements in order to enhance your life. Researchers now report that this drama unfolds at the DNA level too. Here’s what they found: an unstable nucleosome sitting smack dab in the center of an enhancer can get kicked off to make […]
miRNA SNPs Here or There Can Make a Big DifferenceMarch 30, 2010One wrong snip from your barber might leave you with a bad hair day, but a genomic SNP in the wrong place, like a miRNA target site, can leave you in a much worse situation; with a predisposition to cancer. SNPs have been studied extensively in several diseases, but only recently have scientists started looking […]
Non-Coding RNAs in EpigeneticsMarch 30, 2010We interviewed John Mattick a few years back as we were getting ready to launch EpiGenie, but couldn’t manage to get the transcripts all edited and ready for show time. So, when we ran accross this interview in what was Invitrogen’s Quest magazine we were excited, then bummed because we didn’t run it first, then […]