Oh, Behave! How Chromatin Remodeling Regulates Behavioral ResponseFebruary 17, 2009Did your behavior at the lab holiday party elicit whispered comments, furtive glances, and snide snickers from co-workers the next day? Although we don’t know exactly what possessed you to dance on the boss’s coffee table wearing your DNA necktie as a headband, researchers have shown that some physiological and pathological behaviors result from epigenetic […]
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 […]
Summitting With PeakSeq.It’s About MappabilityJanuary 10, 2009ChIP-seq continues to assault bioinformatics teams with avalanches of data, but the upside of using this powerful approach brings some challenges along with it. Modeling background accurately requires a few tweaks, so before you get all excited about the double black diamond peaks that you’re seeing in regulatory motifs, you might want to factor in […]
miRNA Fights Cancer-Promoting Histone MethyltransferaseNovember 23, 2008What makes some tumors as gentle as purring kittens and others of the same cancer type as ferocious as saber-toothed tigers? A miRNA (miR-101) was recently shown to take a bite out of cancer by inhibiting the EZH2 histone methyltransferase. The study by Arul Chinnaiyan and co-workers at the University of Michigan Medical School, the […]
Chromatin Context Tip(60)s the Transcriptional Balance in ESCsNovember 12, 2008Unfortunately, the KISS principle (‘keep it simple, stupid’) doesn’t apply to chromatin. Although we’d like to think that certain histone modifications are always “good” for gene transcription and others are invariably “bad,” Barbara Panning and co-workers at the University of California San Francisco have found that in embryonic stem cells (ESCs), the transcriptional outcome of […]
Silencing Is in the AirNovember 12, 2008Everywhere you look, be it Science or Nature, US Weekly (OK, not quite), silencing by ncRNAs is making headlines. But the targets and mechanisms of this silencing are not always clear. A recent report by Peter Fraser and co-workers at The Babraham Institute (UK) and several other universities and centers in Japan and Europe has […]
Epigenetic Changes in a Hard-to-Treat Childhood CancerNovember 5, 2008A very difficult-to-treat childhood leukemia may benefit from the discovery of a small but potent epigenetic change that launches the cancer but could potentially be reversed relatively easily, preventing cancer-promoting genes from being turned on. Children with the subtype of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) known as MLL-AF4 have a cure rate of just under 50 […]
Mutant HistonesOctober 15, 2008Over the years mutants like E.T., the Hulk, Yoda, and the X-Men to name a few, have all left a lasting impression in our lives. That’s why when a group of John’s Hopkins researchers, led by Jef Boeke, produced a library of synthetic histone H3 and H4 mutants to probe the function of each residue […]
Good Twin/Bad Twin: Is Epigenetics to Blame?October 13, 2008The Evil Twin is a staple of the soap opera genre—you know, the long-lost, villainous sister who kidnaps her virtuous twin and assumes her life, only to be discovered years later when the Good Twin escapes from imprisonment on an alien-inhabited desert isle. But in real life, how can identical twins with the same genes […]
ncRNAs Pave the Way for Chromatin RemodelingOctober 6, 2008Researchers have been puzzled by the discovery of several-kilobase-long, polyadenylated transcripts that overlap functional coding regions but do not themselves encode proteins. A recent Nature paper by Kouji Hirota, Kunihiro Ohta, and co-workers at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute (Japan), the University of Tokyo, and Boston College indicates that some of these ncRNAs are transcriptional […]
