Validating GWAS with Epigenome EditingOctober 10, 2015GWASs (genome-wide association studies) have found a lot of genetic variants associated with various traits and diseases. Â But GWASs suffer from that old weakness, the mantra of every good scientist: correlation does not imply causation. Â The problem gets even worse when you find out most GWAS variants are in non-coding regions of DNA, meaning they […]
MicroRNA Isoforms Distinguish Between Breast Cancer SubtypesOctober 6, 2015Much like the early explorers who set out to find a new trade route to Asia and accidentally stumbled across the Americas, researchers mapping the transcriptome have come across some big surprises. Recently, Isidore Rigoutsos’s lab showed that the expression of microRNA isoforms (called ‘isomiRs’) and tRNAs depends on sex, population, and race. Now, this […]
Gene Circuits that Sense and Respond to DNAOctober 6, 2015Synthetic biology has gone through a sequence-specific revolution recently, with CRISPR-cas leading the charge of systems that can detect any DNA sequence of interest. Â But these techniques have a key limitation: they can only respond locally with one action – cutting, activating, or repressing – at that particular DNA molecule. This is like giving Paul […]
Stressed Nucleosomes Linked to DepressionOctober 6, 2015Have you ever felt stressed and even depressed? Well, a new study linking stress-induced depressive behaviors to changes in nucleosome positioning suggests that in order to relax yourself, you may first need to relax your chromatin. Susceptibility to major depressive disorder (MDD) depends on genetic variability but also on environmental factors such as a stressful […]
RNA-Based, DNA Free Circuits For Gene TherapyOctober 1, 2015Gene therapy, for all its recent progress, seems a bit stuck on the idea of introducing, well, genes, meaning DNA sequences. Â But what about that other nucleic acid, RNA? Â RNA potentially has several advantages over DNA, including a much lower risk of genome integration and lower immunogenicity. Â In fact, we recently saw a transcription-free CRISPR-cas9 […]