Polymerase Furiosus Over Lack of Credit in Bisulfite SequencingSeptember 1, 2010At EpiGenie, we try to call attention not just to the big names in the field that nab most of the limelight, but also to the folks busting their pipettes day and night for new discoveries. So why not give a shout out to a workhorse in the most widely used method for methylation analysis, […]
Silencing of Ultraconserved ncRNAs Is Not So Golden in CancerAugust 31, 2010If you live near a construction site, are listening to one half of a cell-phone conversation in a movie theater, or stuck on an airliner next to a fussy infant, then for you silence may indeed be golden. But, for certain ultraconserved non-coding RNAs, transcriptional silencing can lead to a cellular uproar. A new article […]
DNA Methylation States Mix and Mingle on the Nuclear Dance FloorAugust 31, 2010Remember those lame junior high dances, where most of us stood silently and uncomfortably against the gym wall, watching our wilder classmates rock out to Bon Jovi on the dance floor? Some researchers think that methylated and unmethylated promoters in tumors segregate themselves in the same way: silenced genes gather in heterochromatin at the nuclear […]
The Epigenetics of Mental IllnessAugust 31, 2010Mental disorders like depression will likely affect 1/6 of Americans at some point in their life. That probability might be higher if you’re a Cleveland sports fan, but seriously, with mental illnesses affecting hundreds of millions of people globally each year, we’re glad to see an increasing focus on the epigenetics of these disorders. In […]
Mecp2, miR-212 Keep Cocaine Addiction In CheckAugust 18, 2010Anyone who’s ever seen an episode of Celebrity Rehab knows that addiction is a very complicated issue, and as scientists recently found out, even the molecular basis of addiction is no simple matter. A group led by Paul Kenny at Scripps Florida studied cocaine use in rats that were allowed to dose themselves with the […]
5-Hydroxymethylcytosine Gets SensitiveAugust 17, 2010One of the great things about science is that whenever a new problem presents itself, there are always some members of the community who set out to find innovative solutions. In this case, it’s been a bear to detect and quantify 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5-hmC) but some cagey researchers at the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich, […]
Protein Methylation: The Other Epigenetic RegulatorAugust 13, 2010While epigenetic mechanisms like DNA methylation and chromatin remodeling get most of the attention, more is being learned everyday about other important mechanisms that are just now starting to get their share of the limelight. In this article contributed by John Aletta at CH3 Biosystems, he explains how protein arginine methylation is also a key […]
Expert Insight: 5-hmC Analysis MethodsAugust 5, 2010Last year’s discovery of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5-hmC) caused some epigenetics researchers to suffer a crisis of confidence, provoking many hours of soul-searching questions such as “are my methylation data really accurate?” and “what if what I thought was gene silencing is really activation?” Although current estimates place 5-hmC levels at only a fraction of the 5-mC […]
FFPE: Friend or Foe to Chromatin Analysis?August 4, 2010It Seems like a no-brainer that chopping up proteins and denaturing DNA would have a dramatic effect on chromatin structure. Since so many cancer diagnoses, developmental studies, and examinations of chromatin structure in general rely on slices of wax-embedded tissue blocks, you’d think someone would take a comprehensive look at the effects of prepping those […]
iPS Cells Can’t Escape Their miRNA PastsAugust 4, 2010Even though the second season of The Jersey Shore takes place in Miami, the cast remain true to their ‘guido’ roots. I guess sometimes you just can’t change who you really are. The same is true for microRNA expression profiles of iPS cells. A recent review (Lakshmipathy et.al. 2010) from Ron Hart’s group at the […]