Roadmap EpigenomicsSeptember 25, 2008If you’re looking to sneak your grant in on the earliest date for the Epigenomics of Human Health and Disease (R01) grant, time is ticking. Applications are being accepted starting this Sunday. That’s the right, the date says September 28th. For those of you looking for additional information, the grant information is listed below, but […]
Allele-Specific Modifications: A Tale of Two EpigenomesSeptember 24, 2008It was the best of times, it was the worst of times-one parental allele was transcribing like gangbusters and the other was permanently stalled. Each of us carries a set of genetically distinct chromosomes from mom and dad, and increasing evidence indicates that the two parental genomes also have widespread epigenetic differences. But how can […]
Structural Effects of Histone MethylationSeptember 24, 2008The methylation of histones at specific sites has been linked to both transcriptionally active and repressive chromatin. However, the structural basis for these effects has been difficult to study because homogeneous populations of methylated histones were not available for x-ray crystallography. This situation changed recently with the development of a method to introduce modifications such […]
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. […]
The Methylation Ultimatum in ImprintingAugust 7, 2008 Last week PLoS Genetics ran a great paper from Anders Lindroth and colleagues illustrating a mutually exclusive relationship between DNA Methylation and methylation of H3K27 in the a differentially methylation domain (DMD) of an imprinting control region (ICR). Now before we drop any more epi-breviations…. The area of focus in the study was a […]
ChIPs and MeDIP: ChIP Antibody Selection TipsJuly 9, 2008Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) remains a powerful method to characterize in vivo binding of DNA hugging proteins like histones and transcription factors and more recently has been used effectively for DNA methylation studies. The ChIP technique has been around since the days of big hair and “Miami Vice,” so we won’t review it here much, but […]
ChIP TipsJune 1, 2008There’s a reason chromosome immunoprecipitation (ChIP) continues to be used in labs all over the world. It works well. In fact, there aren’t too many ways to map minute-by-minute changes at a single promoter, or alternatively, follow a single transcription factor over the entire human genome. ChIP is very versatile and can yield significant insights […]
