Raising the Bar on ChIP Antibody QCOctober 1, 2009Nowadays, we still find antibodies at the core of many key lab techniques, but there’s a big difference in what’s going on downstream of the IP today. A few years ago researchers were looking at varying shades of grey on a gel; a gel that didn’t eat up too much grant money. Now, the downstream […]
Small RNA Sequencing Adds Color(Space) to miRNA Dynamics in Stem Cell RegulationOctober 1, 2009For the last few years, stem cell researchers have been intrigued by miRNAs’ Houdini-esqe disappearing act as stem cells embrace their fate. Add in evidence showing how knocking out endogenous miRNA machinery like Ago2 can really add a few kinks to proper neural development and you get a stem cell community that’s fired up to […]
BayesPeak Analysis Ups Your ChIP-Seq GameOctober 1, 2009Proteins have been binding DNA for some time now, but only recently has ChIP-Seqencing (ChiP-Seq) pointed exactly where. As the technique becomes more popular, more researchers are wondering; what’s the best way to analyze the mounds of data they’ve just created with their ChIP-seq experiments? To tackle this problem, a group of bioinformaticians from the […]
A Tangled Web We Weave When We Practice to RegulateSeptember 10, 2009We’ve all seen them hanging on the freezers and filling otherwise empty wall space in labs–signal transduction maps that look like abstract artwork. They’re enough to make even the most dedicated researcher wonder if there’s light at the end of the tunnel. As difficult as it is to make sense of complex transcriptional cascades, generating […]
miRNA Regulatory Documentary Bonus Footage: Featuring XRN-2September 10, 2009Most miRNA plots we follow share a similar climactic ending: miRNA inhibits this, in this condition, in response to this. Don’t get us wrong. We can read about miRNA regulation all day, which is good because we often do, but do you ever wonder what happens to miRNAs after they’ve locked their target, and put […]