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 […]
The Methylation Ultimatum in ImprintingAugust 7, 2008 Last week PLoS Genetics ran a great paper from Anders Lindroth and colleagues illustrating a mutually exclusive relationship between DNA Methylation and methylation of H3K27 in the a differentially methylation domain (DMD) of an imprinting control region (ICR). Now before we drop any more epi-breviations…. The area of focus in the study was a […]
Can Batman Save Whole Methylome Analysis?July 25, 2008With all the hype around Batman-The Dark Knight, we missed one of the most recent heroic efforts to facilitate global methylation studies. The unveiling of a Bayesian tool for methylation analysis (Batman) enables researchers to estimate absolute methylation levels across a range of CpG dense regions using methylated DNA immunoprecipitation (MeDIP) approaches combined with either […]
