Oh, Behave! How Chromatin Remodeling Regulates Behavioral ResponseFebruary 17, 2009Did your behavior at the lab holiday party elicit whispered comments, furtive glances, and snide snickers from co-workers the next day? Although we don’t know exactly what possessed you to dance on the boss’s coffee table wearing your DNA necktie as a headband, researchers have shown that some physiological and pathological behaviors result from epigenetic […]
miRNAs Adding Restraint to Alu DuplicationFebruary 17, 2009February 17th, 2009. Even in evolution there can be too much of a good thing. What if a transposon broke free and replicated whenever it wanted to, and integrated wherever it wanted to, unchecked? How long would the host be around? Such may have happened to Alu repeats in primates about 40 million years ago. […]
miRNA-29b at the Bedside?February 16, 2009Start stocking the miRNA-29b in your medicine cabinet. A group of researchers from The Ohio State University recently cranked out some great data demonstrating how miRNAs work to regulate DNA methylation in acute myeloid leukemia (AML), outlining a potential therapeutic use of mir-29b. The study reveals how miR-29b works by targeting DNA Methyltransferases (DNMTs), the […]
The miRNA Importin BizFebruary 10, 2009For all we know about miRNA – how it’s made, what it does, how it folds, … – comparatively little is known about how the Argonaute (Ago) proteins allow miRNA to do what it does. Yet thanks to a group out of Germany, we now understand a bit more of the machinery that lets miRNA […]
Chromatin Maps Conserved Missing linc-RNAFebruary 3, 2009 Researchers in Boston figured that maybe they could find something interesting in all the non-protein, non-miRNA, non-siRNA genes. They did…linc-RNAs. Through a massive sequencing of ChIP data they uncovered a chromatin “signature” for actively transcribed regions between known protein coding genes, and used this signature to identify about 1700 previously un-annotated stretches of the genome at […]
