Epigenetic Clock Goes from Analog to iWatchFebruary 6, 2015Tick tock…we all know that life is a battle against the inevitability of time. But wouldn’t it be great if you could get a real idea of how your cells are aging? It may just help make 20 the new 30, that is when it comes to your chance of death. And that’s the ambitious […]
DNMT1 Depletion Helps Hunt for Heritable MethylationFebruary 5, 2015Sometimes it takes a special kind of guy to get the job done and when the job is to keep imprinted genes differentially methylated, that guy is DNMT1. An international group of researchers led by Jacquetta Trasler in Canada set out to exploit this fact in order to identify yet unknown imprinted genomic sequences. Several […]
Neurodevelopment and Methylomic Trajectories: Sex and DiseaseFebruary 4, 2015If variety is the spice to life than the brain must be the spiciest organ of them all, with DNA methylation as its rooster sauce (which comes with its own embedded sodium bisuflite conversion kit). By studying the delicious layers of DNA methylation variation we’ve seen strange parental expression biases, methylation differences between discordant twins, and how the dynamics […]
A Good Friend is Forever: DNMTs and Histone ComplexesJanuary 26, 2015It’s not always easy to find good friends, but recent work has found that the de novo DNA methyltransferases DNMT3A2 and DNMT3B1 are far from socially awkward. Baubec et al. from the Swiss team lead by Dirk Schübeler uncovered some companions of these DNMTs by profiling their binding in embryonic stem cells (ESCs) through streptavidin […]
Abcam’s Bisulfite-Seq High Sensitivity Kit Streamlines 5mC DetectionJanuary 26, 2015The new Bisulfite-Seq High Sensitivity Kit from the creative crew at Abcam, is a 2-in-1 package that weaves bisulfite conversion, and Illumina® sequencing library prep into the same process. This single kit can take you from sample DNA, to firing up a Bisulfite Sequencing (BS) run that same day. There’s No Such Thing as Too […]
Active Demethylation: TET Enzymes, 5hmC, and CompanyJanuary 20, 20155hmC was originally discovered way back in the 50’s in bacteriophages and was first observed in mammals in the 70’s, but research into this was set back when these studies failed to replicate. And going back to the future, in 2009 two independent research groups, publishing on the same pages in science, found that this “unknown […]
Why Drugs in Dad Can Affect Your EpigenomeJanuary 15, 2015Some people aren’t always happy about what gets passed on from their parents. It’s great to have your Dad’s strong cheekbones but not so great to have his lactose intolerance. It turns out we may acquire even more from our fathers than we ever thought during our germ cell years. A new study from Elizabeth Thomas’s lab […]
Passive Demethylation Drives DevelopmentJanuary 15, 2015Ever taken one of those online personality tests, such as those that tell you if you’ve got a passive or active personality? Well researchers at Stanford set out to perform such a test, not on themselves, but to uncover the ‘personality’ of demethylation during development. DNA can be demethylated actively through the TET enzyme family, or passively during DNA […]
Guide: Bisulfite-Converted DNA AmplificationJanuary 12, 2015Over the years, bisulfite conversion has become the most widely used method for DNA methylation analysis. It is the most convenient and effective way to map DNA methylation to individual bases. As the first step in numerous downstream analysis techniques, it is absolutely critical that the bisulfite conversion process is understood and performed well. Our […]
Webinar: A Step-by-Step Guide to ChIP-Seq Data AnalysisJanuary 12, 2015In this webinar, Dr. Xi Chen takes publicly available real ChIP-seq data sets to show you how to perform ChIP-seq routine analysis using a combination of different online tools available. This provides an opportunity for bioinformatics beginners and wet-lab biologists who do not have much experience with unix operating systems to have an idea about […]
