SCAN-ing For Chromatin GoldMarch 2, 2010If you run enough tedious ChIP experiments, it feels like you might as well be panning for gold back in the 1800s; doing a lot of work for a few nuggets of data. Luckily some technological wizards at Cornell University have your back and are working on a new system called SCAN (Single Chromatin Analysis […]
Epigenetic Marks Make the Long Distance Thing Look EasyFebruary 22, 2010Even with all the advanced communications at our fingertips today, long distance relationships rarely work out, but it appears epigenetic silencing is an exception. Epigenetic silencing can spread to neighboring genomic regions through long-range epigenetic silencing (LRES) in cancer cells. In LRES, large blocks of genomic regions (like on the order of megabases) get silenced. […]
Transcription Factors Stand Up to the Methylation MachineFebruary 18, 2010Sometimes the best defense is a good offense. That appears to be the case for transcription factors (TFs) that resist de novo DNA methylation by binding to their sites in CpG islands. Although this idea has been around for awhile, a team of German and American researchers led by Michael Rehli recently provided the first […]
CpG Methyltransferases Caught in the Act-and in Real TimeFebruary 17, 2010Being “caught in the act” isn’t usually a good thing, but catching DNA methyltransferases in the act is a very good thing for epigeneticists. A team at the University of Southampton (U.K.) now reports that they have developed a reproducible, real-time fluorescent assay that will help scientists understand how these enzymes regulate themselves, interact with […]
CSI’s Newest Crime-Solving Tool: miRNAsFebruary 17, 2010The TV franchise CSI: Crime Scene Investigation makes it seem like analyzing biological samples in a criminal investigation is as simple as pushing a button on a fancy gizmo and having the results printed out within seconds. (Of course, they also solve complex mysteries in under an hour every week, so I guess you can’t […]
