The miRNA Importin BizFebruary 10, 2009For all we know about miRNA – how it’s made, what it does, how it folds, … – comparatively little is known about how the Argonaute (Ago) proteins allow miRNA to do what it does. Yet thanks to a group out of Germany, we now understand a bit more of the machinery that lets miRNA […]
Chromatin Maps Conserved Missing linc-RNAFebruary 3, 2009 Researchers in Boston figured that maybe they could find something interesting in all the non-protein, non-miRNA, non-siRNA genes. They did…linc-RNAs. Through a massive sequencing of ChIP data they uncovered a chromatin “signature” for actively transcribed regions between known protein coding genes, and used this signature to identify about 1700 previously un-annotated stretches of the genome at […]
DNA Methylation Resuscitation in PlantsFebruary 3, 2009Conventional wisdom had it that once a methylated repeat sequence is heavily demethylated, there’s no turning back. Not only don’t they become remethylated, but subsequent generations inherit the epigenetic changes as well. But a group of European researchers have found that this isn’t always the case and there are at least two distinct classes of […]
Blast from the Past: Methylation Profiling of Archival Lymphoma SamplesFebruary 3, 2009Imagine that you could go back in time and analyze the DNA methylation profiles of long-ago cancer samples (not to mention recession-proof your investment portfolio). EpiGenie can’t help with the latter because our time machine is on the fritz, but we can tell you about a new study in which researchers profiled the methylomes of […]
Fixing Small RNA Detection in FFPE SamplesFebruary 2, 2009In situ hybridization (ISH) is great to tell how much miRNA is expressed where. But it’s not so easy to get a signal from low-abundance miRNAs in formalin-fixed tissue. Formaldehyde cross-links RNA to proteins, diminishing the ability of probes to recognize and bind to the RNA, and can modify some of the bases as well. […]