How You Are Conceived Makes a Difference in Your EpigeneticsJuly 22, 2009Ahem! What we mean is that being conceived in a dish versus the natural way can affect the methylation of your DNA. Previous studies suggested that the less romantic method of putting sperm and egg together in vitro (assisted reproduction technology; ART) resulted in a higher risk of birth defects and rare disorders that involve […]
CLIPped Mouse Testes Reveal Novel Class of Small RNAsJuly 16, 2009Fish with germ cell-specific bait, and you get a new class of RNA. U Penn researchers CLIPped (Cross-Linked and ImmunoPrecipitated) mouse testis extract with the anti-DNA/RNA-binding protein MSY2, and caught a whole bunch of novel ~30 nt RNAs. While about 7% of these were known piRNAs, most came from a distinct class of testicular RNAs […]
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 […]
On Your Marks: Antibodies That Should be in Every Epigenetics Researcher’s FridgeJuly 15, 2009Chromatin is a complicated scene. Staying on top of who’s who in residue and degree-specific histone modifications and chromatin modifying proteins is more than a full time job. So, if you’re looking to jump start your investigations and pull down some quick hitting data, you’ll want to consider picking up on some quality antibodies targeting […]
This Hi-Def Methylation Experience is Brought to You by Bisulfite CaptureJuly 15, 2009Even if you don’t have a new flat screen HD TV hanging in your living room, most of us have at least seen the beauty that is HD when strolling through the TV section in the local Wal-Mart or Best Buy. The picture is so crystal-clear that watching a game in HD is just like […]
miBridge: Bringing mRNA UTRs TogetherJuly 9, 2009When it comes to the the miRNA translational repression model, 5’ UTRs have been neglected more than California’s budget deficit in recent years. Despite computational approaches predicting oodles of miRNA docking sites for miRNAs in the 5’ UTR, we haven’t seen that many studies tackle the other side of miRNA repression. But just a few […]
Differentiation Got Your Chromatin in a Bind?July 8, 2009Euchromatin could be what gives stem cells their stemness. A screen for factors that both reduce embryonic stem (ES) cells’ ability to expand and diminish their expression of stem cell marker Oct4 yielded just one that hadn’t been seen before: the chromatin-remodeling enzyme Chd1. Chd1 recognizes di-or tri-methylated histone 3 at lysine 4 (H3K4me2/3) – […]
Want Smooth Muscle? You’ll Need Some miR-145July 8, 2009OK, maybe you won’t find a bottle of miR-145 at the juice bar of your local gym anytime soon, but a paper published recently in Nature says that miR-145 is all you really need to turn mouse cardiac progenitor cells into smooth muscle. What’s more, both miR-145 and miR-143 team up to regulate a smooth […]
Wounds Make Polycomb Group Proteins (PcGs) SkedaddleJuly 7, 2009Ouch! Skinned knees and paper cuts are a fact of life—we’ve certainly had our share. But we’d never wondered what was going on in those wounds, unlike Paul Martin and Tanya Shaw at the University of Bristol. They have realized that wound healing is similar to embryogenesis, a process in which epigenetic mods are commonplace. […]
DNA Methylation and HIV LatencyJuly 1, 2009You’d think keeping HIV from replicating was a good thing, and it is … unless you’re trying to eradicate the virus. One of the world’s most elusive viruses is an expert at maintaining a low profile, laying dormant in CD4+ cells even during highly active anti-retroviral treatment (HAART). A team of American and Swedish researchers […]