Worming Your Way to Longer Life Through Histone DemethylationJune 22, 2010Life’s tough when you’re a C. elegans worm. You hatch, you molt, you reproduce (usually with yourself), and then you die, all within 2–3 weeks. But a talented team of researchers at Stanford has found a way to keep worms wriggling long after they normally go to the great compost heap in the sky. Stanford’s […]
Nucleosome Dynamics: CATCH-IT if You CanJune 9, 2010Since our interview last year with Steve Henikoff, in which we discussed his Roadmap Epigenomics R21 grant, we’ve been itching to learn all the details of his new method for studying nucleosome turnover. On May 28, our wait was finally over with the debut of the CATCH-IT (covalent attachment of tags to capture histones and […]
Fun, Sun and MethylationJune 8, 2010Summertime is here, and that means that we’ll all be spending more time outdoors and in the sun. But, while you are out there doing your best to get as tan as the cast of Baywatch, some new details about how age and sun exposure can change your skin’s DNA methylation patterns may make you […]
Unscrambling Nucleosome-DNA Methylation RelationsJune 7, 2010Like the age-old “chicken-or-the-egg” question, epigeneticists have wondered which comes first, nucleosome positioning or DNA methylation. One school of thought is that DNA must be unwrapped from nucleosomes to allow methyltransferase access before methylation can occur, but a new study in Nature suggests that this theory isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. A […]
Memories Saved By DNA MethylationJune 7, 2010The connection between memory and epigenetics has been has been a hot topic over the last couple of years. A recent article in Nature Neuroscience adds a new wrinkle to the subject by showing that DNA methylation helps to save memories, in addition to creating them. Sort of like using the “Keep Until I Delete” […]