Sorting Out Epigenetic Marks NanostyleSeptember 7, 2009Cornell molecular geneticist Paul Soloway wants to know where epigenetic marks coincide – and not just in which patients, or in which tissues, or even in which cells, but on which individual stretches of chromatin. He and co-PI Harold Craighead, an engineering physicist at Cornell, have an Epigenomics Roadmap grant that will help them find […]
Chromatin Structure: More Biasing Than A Political Talk ShowAugust 26, 2009If you watch television news these days, you can spot bias a mile away. Well, we can’t do much about shoddy journalism, but a new report from scientists at UC Berkeley, led by Michael Eisen, calls attention to some bias we can fix; the kind caused by the structure of chromatin in ChIP experiments. The […]
Bioinformatics Brawn Links Histone Mods To mRNA SplicingAugust 25, 2009With terabytes of data streaming off sequencers nowadays, there’s heaps of data available that is begging to be mined. You don’t always have to run your own wet lab experiments either, if you know where to look. We know most bosses or PIs out there will probably resist cutting you loose to Starbuck’s to “crunch […]
Vidaza® and Entinostat Combo; A Potential Lung Cancer TherapyAugust 6, 2009Some things always seem better in combos: beer & pizza, SpongeBob & square pants… Soon, we may need to add Vidaza® & entinostat to that list. At the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting, researchers from Johns Hopkins Medical Institute and the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute reported that the combination of Vidaza® (5-azacitidine) […]
Mir-143 Slacks Off, Leaving DNMT3A To Run Wild In Colorectal CancerAugust 6, 2009We like to think of epigenetics in terms of distinct areas like chromatin, DNA methylation and non-coding RNA (heck, we’ve even divided up the EpiGenie website that way), but more and more evidence is blurring the lines and showing us how these overlap. A recent publication from researchers at The Chinese University of Hong Kong […]
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 […]
DNA Repeats; More Than Just Broken RecordsJuly 30, 2009Roughly half of the human genome is made up of repetitive DNA sequences, and yet their repetitive nature has made their study as difficult to decipher as James Brown lyrics on a scratched record. Recent evidence shows chromatin regulation of DNA repeats playing a role in gene regulation, genome integrity and chromosome maintenance, so scientists […]
Patience is Key to RNA Pol II Relationship with NucleosomeJuly 30, 2009here’s been lots of buzz about nucleosomes and RNAs lately. In fact, just last week EpiGenie reported that transcription initiation RNAs (tiRNAs) might be formed as RNA Pol II hits a nucleosome and backtracks. Nucleosomal post-transcriptional mods can cause RNA Polymerase II to pause or abort, while others can kick transcription into high gear. But […]
Chromatin’s Flex in Restricted Calorie DietsJuly 23, 2009Starve a mouse and its aging processes slow to a crawl. Same thing goes for yeast and beast alike – the effects of calorie reduction (CR) on longevity are conserved throughout the eukaryote evolution. The benefits of caloric reduction in mammals have grabbed the headlines of mainstream media routinely in recent years. The July 10th […]
NIH Digs into the Diet Movement with New Epigenetics Research GrantsJuly 16, 2009Nowadays it seems like everybody’s on some kind of a diet. Until recently, even public funding for epigenetic research had been leaner than a movie star on the South Beach diet. But with last year’s funding of the Roadmap Initiative and yesterday’s release of grant applications for the study of diet and epigenetics, things are […]
