ChIP-SICAP – Your New Favorite Assay Flavor?November 1, 2016Maple-bacon, chocolate, and hedgehog? The list of potato chip flavors keeps on getting longer and crazier. Also getting longer is the list of different ChIP assay varieties (that’s chromatin immunoprecipitation for the uninitiated), with the most interesting new “taste sensation” emanating from the lab of Jeroen Krijgsveld (DFKZ/EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany). While chips are good for […]
Variation in CpG Methylation is Tied to Biological AgingOctober 19, 2016There aren’t many things in this world that we can be certain about, but aging marks an all too important exception. Towards the goal of understanding the marks of this unavoidable process, we’ve seen the epigenetic clock, which looks at CpG sites that are certainly differentially methylated as we age. However, a new perspective to […]
Meta-Analysis Reveals Grim Reaper is Keeping an Eye On Your Epigenetic ClockOctober 19, 2016They say ‘Seasons don’t fear the reaper’, and while the festivities of this season certainly favor the reaper, most of us dread the reaper’s favor. Our understanding of how to avoid that favor is now improving, thanks to some new insight from the epigenetic clock-watching lab of Steve Horvath at UCLA. The epigenetic clock consists […]
Cancer Stem Cells Refuse to be Linked to Linker Histone H1.0October 19, 2016It is widely known that tumor lesions harbor diverse subpopulations of cell types each genetically and phenotypically unique. However, it is not always clear which cell types are actually promoting or sustaining the tumor. Typically, tumors consist of two class of cells—a subpopulation of cells that are fully differentiated and possess little to none tumor […]
Controlling Gene Circuits With sgRNA-RNA Aptamer HybridsOctober 10, 2016Earlier this year, Chris Voigt’s lab wrote an automated composer for synthetic gene circuits, which can design circuits to do what you want, all the way down to the DNA sequence. As good musicians know, however, the work doesn’t stop once the composer’s ink dries on the page – the next step is to find […]