Clamping Down on Affinity ReagentsAugust 4, 2009U of Chicago protein engineer Shohei Koide knows there’s biology beyond the genome. Adding a methyl group onto a histone here, or an acetyl group onto one there, can change the way genes are expressed. There’s gotta be a reliable way of finding those postranslational mods in the first place, though, right? That’s why he […]
Measuring Nucleosome Dynamics with CATCH-ITMay 25, 2009When he’s not running his lab up at the Hutch or co-editing epigenetics’ only open source journal, Epigenetics and Chromatin, Dr. Steve Henikoff tinkers a bit (ok…that might be a bit of an understatement). Credited with inventing a range of useful research methods that have streamlined processes from sequencing to computational prediction tools, the Chicago […]
DNA Methylation, the NIH Epigenomics Program, and What’s Next in EpigeneticsApril 1, 2009Joseph Francis Costello received his Ph.D. at Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois where he and his mentor, Dr. Russell Pieper discovered aberrant DNA methylation of the MGMT promoter in glioblastomas, which has since become the most widely used molecular marker to predict patient response to chemotherapy. In 1995, he became a postdoctoral fellow at the […]
Integrated Epigenetic Profiling in Primary Human CellsFebruary 25, 2009The Costello Lab at UCSF is another of the four Reference Epigenome Mapping Centers (REMCs, not to be confused with REM although I’m sure Michael Stipe would be very proud of the work going on at the REMCs). According to Dr. Joseph Costello, his lab will be rolling up their sleeves with scientists at UC […]
Susan Clark: Leading Ladies in Epigenetics ResearchOctober 8, 2008A native of Australia, Susan J. Clark obtained her PhD in 1982 from the University of Adelaide. For the next 8 years, Dr. Clark worked in the biotech industry before returning to basic research where she was instrumental in developing the bisulphite sequencing method for DNA methylation analysis in the early 90s. Dr. Clark is […]
Karolin Luger: Leading Ladies in Epigenetics ResearchSeptember 8, 2008As a post-doctoral fellow in 1997, Karolin Luger burst onto the chromatin scene with the now classic Nature cover story, “Structure of the nucleosome core particle at 2.8 Å resolution” [Nature 1997, 389, 251−260]. A native of Austria, Dr. Luger joined the faculty at Colorado State University in 1999, where she is an HHM Investigator. […]
Joan Steitz: Leading Ladies in Epigenetics ResearchSeptember 4, 2008In 1967, Joan Argetsinger Steitz received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she conducted her doctoral research on RNA bacteriophage in the lab of Dr. James Watson. As a post-doc at Cambridge, Dr. Steitz studied ribosome binding sites in mRNA. In 1970, she joined the faculty at Yale and began her groundbreaking and now famous […]
PatMAn and the Magnificent Seven Methylation ClassifiersJune 16, 2008It seems pattern recognition and supervised learning techniques are being applied to epigenetics research a lot nowadays. These advanced computational techniques that have proven useful in everything from homeland security to financial modeling are lending a hand to some of the challenges in epigenetics research. Recently we’ve seen them applied to miRNA discovery and target […]
Espionage, Genetics, and miRNAMarch 12, 2008George Adrian Calin received both his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at Carol Davila University of Medicine in Bucharest, Romania, where he started cytogenetics work with Dr Dragos Stefanescu. After completing cancer genomics training in Dr. Massimo Negrini’s laboratory at University of Ferrara, Italy, he became a postdoctoral fellow at Kimmel Cancer Center in Philadelphia, PA, […]