This Hi-Def Methylation Experience is Brought to You by Bisulfite CaptureJuly 15, 2009Even if you don’t have a new flat screen HD TV hanging in your living room, most of us have at least seen the beauty that is HD when strolling through the TV section in the local Wal-Mart or Best Buy. The picture is so crystal-clear that watching a game in HD is just like […]
miBridge: Bringing mRNA UTRs TogetherJuly 9, 2009When it comes to the the miRNA translational repression model, 5’ UTRs have been neglected more than California’s budget deficit in recent years. Despite computational approaches predicting oodles of miRNA docking sites for miRNAs in the 5’ UTR, we haven’t seen that many studies tackle the other side of miRNA repression. But just a few […]
Differentiation Got Your Chromatin in a Bind?July 8, 2009Euchromatin could be what gives stem cells their stemness. A screen for factors that both reduce embryonic stem (ES) cells’ ability to expand and diminish their expression of stem cell marker Oct4 yielded just one that hadn’t been seen before: the chromatin-remodeling enzyme Chd1. Chd1 recognizes di-or tri-methylated histone 3 at lysine 4 (H3K4me2/3) – […]
Want Smooth Muscle? You’ll Need Some miR-145July 8, 2009OK, maybe you won’t find a bottle of miR-145 at the juice bar of your local gym anytime soon, but a paper published recently in Nature says that miR-145 is all you really need to turn mouse cardiac progenitor cells into smooth muscle. What’s more, both miR-145 and miR-143 team up to regulate a smooth […]
Wounds Make Polycomb Group Proteins (PcGs) SkedaddleJuly 7, 2009Ouch! Skinned knees and paper cuts are a fact of life—we’ve certainly had our share. But we’d never wondered what was going on in those wounds, unlike Paul Martin and Tanya Shaw at the University of Bristol. They have realized that wound healing is similar to embryogenesis, a process in which epigenetic mods are commonplace. […]