DNA Methylation, miRNAs, and MetastasisSeptember 9, 2008OK this one is a week old, but we love a paper that addresses epigenetic regulation of epigenetic regulators, so we couldn’t resist a recent PNAS report that identified a miRNA DNA methylation signature for human cancer metastasis. Like proteins, miRNAs act as oncogenes, tumor suppressors, and metastatic mediators, and their expression can be influenced […]
Karolin Luger: Leading Ladies in Epigenetics ResearchSeptember 8, 2008As a post-doctoral fellow in 1997, Karolin Luger burst onto the chromatin scene with the now classic Nature cover story, “Structure of the nucleosome core particle at 2.8 Å resolution” [Nature 1997, 389, 251−260]. A native of Austria, Dr. Luger joined the faculty at Colorado State University in 1999, where she is an HHM Investigator. […]
Joan Steitz: Leading Ladies in Epigenetics ResearchSeptember 4, 2008In 1967, Joan Argetsinger Steitz received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she conducted her doctoral research on RNA bacteriophage in the lab of Dr. James Watson. As a post-doc at Cambridge, Dr. Steitz studied ribosome binding sites in mRNA. In 1970, she joined the faculty at Yale and began her groundbreaking and now famous […]
miRNAs: From worthless junk to evolutionary slam dunkAugust 17, 2008Gone are the days when microRNAs (miRNAs) were relegated to the unimportant “junk heap” of sequences cluttering up the genome. We now know that these tiny, highly conserved non-coding RNAs play important roles in RNA stability and translation by base-pairing with partially complementary sequences in the 3’ untranslated regions (UTRs) of target mRNAs. Moreover, a […]
Integration now! DNA methylation, genomic imbalance, and gene expression analyses in osteosarcomaAugust 17, 2008No longer can the genetic and epigenetic causes of cancer and the resulting changes in gene expression be analyzed separately, with little regard for their interdependency. In this spirit, Jeremy Squire and coworkers at the Hospital for Sick Children, the Ontario Cancer Institute, and Queen’s University (all in Canada) conducted the first integrative analysis of […]
