New Rising STARs of Transcriptional ActivationMarch 9, 2015If you can pronounce CRISPR, you know RNA-mediated gene control has been a rising star in synthetic biology. In principle, RNA regulation allows gene circuits to have many more independent control switches than traditional protein transcription factors. CRISPR has turned out to be a great system for RNA-guided gene repression, but it hasn’t been as […]
A cHi-C Way of Capturing Chromatin ConformationMarch 9, 2015Identifying cancer risk loci is like trying to find a key you lost somewhere in your apartment. You know that it’s there and by combining experience with indistinct recollection you can even narrow it down to a few square meters. Now imagine you not only have to find the key but also map all the […]
Gene Expression Comes Full CircRNAMarch 9, 2015Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a diverse RNA species that regulate gene expression in some funky ways, like functioning as super absorbent miRNA sponges in mammalian cells. However, they also seem to be particularly relevant to the brain. Recent research adds a new function to this ‘outside of the box’ method of regulating gene expression by observing circRNAs […]
Webinar: An Engineered Synergistic CRISPR/Cas9 Activator Complex for Genome-wide Transcriptional ControlMarch 4, 2015Presenter: Silvana Konermann, Graduate Student in Dr Feng Zhang’s Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Systematic interrogation of gene function requires the ability to perturb gene expression in a robust and generalizable manner. The ease and scalability of the CRISPR-Cas9 system potentially enables systematic, genome-scale perturbation, but the magnitude of transcriptional up-regulation achieved by the first generation of Cas9 transcriptional […]
Epigenetic Sequencing Woes Overcome by Services Know-howMarch 1, 2015Sequencing technologies have created a dizzying number of opportunities for epigenetic researchers to explore questions that couldn’t be tackled before. Despite the immense power that sequencing delivers, though, the whole process still isn’t quite as simple as pushing a big red button, and watching the groundbreaking discoveries roll in. Even as sequencing becomes faster, easier, […]