epigenetics

Epigenetics and ncRNA Headlines

Get all the latest highlights from the literature and special features covering trending epigenetics, ncRNA, and gene regulation research.

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m⁶Ajor New Function for MicroRNAs in RNA Methylation

February 20, 2015

It’s no secret that microRNAs are pretty busy molecules. A single microRNA can regulate the expression of several, maybe even hundreds, of transcripts. If that wasn’t enough, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing now add another function to this packed list of duties: the control of m6A RNA methylation, which is emerging as an […]

Getting started with Chromatin Conformation Capture (3C)

February 15, 2015

The concept of chromatin contact mapping, or determining the three-dimensional structure conformation and interactions of chromatin domains, is now a reality because of Chromatin Conformation Capture (3C) and subsequent methods born out of that approach. Several new 3C-based techniques have emerged, each with particular strengths and applications, but the sheer variety creates a challenge when […]

Expressed Long Non-coding RNAs Snitch on Tissue-specific Enhancers

February 11, 2015

Predicting tissue-specific enhancers is a tricky business. While histone marks such as H3K4me1 and binding of p300 are good enhancer predictors, pointing out which enhancers are tissue-specific is more of a challenge. That is, of course, unless you have PreSTIGE – an algorithm developed by the Scacheri lab that identifies tissue-specific enhancers by combining H3K4me1 […]

Culture Shock: The Transition to Transformed Cell Alters the Methylome

February 10, 2015

Whether it’s making the monumental move to high school, switching jobs or experiencing the culture shock from moving countries, adjusting to a new environment isn’t always easy. Often we have to make concessions and tradeoffs, the extent of which is very much dependent on the type of environment we find ourselves in. It turns out […]

Review: Crosslinking-Immunoprecipitation (CLIP) Methods

February 8, 2015

RNA-protein interactions are key to understanding human health and disease. Crosslinking-immunoprecipitation (CLIP) and related technologies are powerful tools for characterizing these interactions. Since their introduction in 2008 (Licatalosi et al., 2008), CLIP-based approaches have been applied to prominent RNA research fields such as HIV and cancer. Recently, Sebla Kutluay and colleagues used CLIP to characterize […]

Epigenetic Clock Goes from Analog to iWatch

February 6, 2015

Tick 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 Methylation

February 5, 2015

Sometimes 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 […]

From Neuron to Germline: Inheritance by Mobile RNAs

February 4, 2015

We’ve got transgenerational epigenetic inheritance on the mind and now strangely enough it seems that the mind also causes transgenerational epigenetic inheritance?! Researchers have just shown the strangest case of inheritance yet: soma to germline. A talented team from the University of Maryland have been tracing double stranded RNA (dsRNA) in C. elegans and have made some interesting observations […]

Neurodevelopment and Methylomic Trajectories: Sex and Disease

February 4, 2015

If 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 […]

Cellular Transdifferentiation: Meet the 21st Century Alchemists

February 3, 2015

For centuries, some of the world’s leading scholars worked endlessly with one objective, to turn ordinary metals into gold. Now, scientists of the 21st century are trying their hand at another type of alchemy, turning one cell type into another. This process, known as ‘transdifferentiation’ or ‘direct reprogramming’ can create a potentially limitless source of […]