Placental Proxies: A Shared DNA Methylation Profile Between cffDNA and BrainSeptember 27, 2022When you’re looking to access the latest and greatest publications, your VPN is the proxy you need. But now, there’s a new proxy in town to help with your quest for neurodevelopmental epigenetic information: Placenta and the cell free fetal DNA (cffDNA) that originates from it. A dynamic duo of papers from the lab of Janine LaSalle (UC Davis […]
RNA Methylation and DNA Demethylation Teamwork Make the Transcriptional Dream WorkSeptember 25, 2022Dream teams come in all shapes and sizes, from the 1970 Brazil football team to the Mercedes F1 team of the 2010s. A new epigenetic alliance formed between RNA methylation and DNA demethylation recently made its competitive debut and now shows how teamwork makes the dream work! A synergistic team led by Dongxin Lin, Jian […]
eBook: Epigenetics of COVID-19September 22, 2022COVID-19 has been one of the biggest public health issues in recent history and has changed the daily lives of almost everyone on the planet. Many researchers, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies have been working around the clock since the novel coronavirus outbreak started to try to develop new tools to test for and treat the […]
Brain Cells Choose Cilia Over Social Media to Make Exciting New Connections!September 19, 2022When was the last time you made an exciting new connection? At an international conference, the coffee shop, or social media? A welcoming new study now provides evidence that brain cells don’t go to these lengths or even have to take a standard synaptic approach; instead, they use a connection – an axo-ciliary synapse – […]
Keeping Aging in LINE by Stabilizing HeterochromatinSeptember 11, 2022Like many aspects of our lives, epigenetic processes can get out of control during aging. Now, exciting new findings have revealed that the secret to keeping our aging epigenomes “in line” is removing LINE-1 RNA from cells, which stabilizes heterochromatin and reverses signs of aging! Previous studies have shown how age-associated heterochromatin loss associates with […]
Multiomic Face-off Finds the Factors that Lead to Look-alikes!September 6, 2022Have you ever heard of someone bumping into their doppelgänger and wondered how the forces of biology conspired to make two unrelated people look alike? In a recent study, a few familiar faces took advantage of a photographer’s keen eye and a multiomic “face-off” to find those factors that lead two strangers to look alike! […]
Novel Multiomic Epigenetic Clock May Decipher How Epigenetic Aging Impacts Cell FunctionAugust 23, 2022Timely advances have demonstrated that significant changes to DNA methylation levels accompany the creaking knees, failing eyes, and changing tastes in music (!) associated with the human aging process. A well-timed study now builds upon these past studies to describe a multiomic-based approach with the potential to forge links between epigenetic aging and the gene […]
No Cells? No Problem! How Cell-Free DNA Methylation Profiles May Guide Cancer ManagementAugust 20, 2022When set the monumental task of studying how the epigenetic mechanisms underlying tumorigenesis, isolating a cell sample usually represents your first analytical port of call; however, research now suggests that liquid biopsies of a patient’s blood may provide a wealth of information from cell-free DNA. Furthermore, widening this approach to DNA methylation analysis may also […]
The Human Imprintome Maps out the Epigenetic Roots of DiseaseAugust 20, 2022A well-illustrated map may have helped the Spanish easily locate El Dorado or David Livingstone pinpoint the source of the Nile; now, rugged researchers have delicately “sliced” through the jungle of the human genome to create a map of imprint control regions (ICRs) – creating the “imprintome” – to hasten our exploration of the epigenetic […]
Multimodal Nanopore Profiling of Circulating Tumor DNAAugust 1, 2022The Oxford Nanopore (ONT) sequencing platform may have more modalities than a Swiss army knife. In a multimodal masterpiece of a new study, researchers now demonstrate how DNA methylation, copy number alterations, nucleosome footprinting, and fragmentation profiles derived from liquid biopsies of cancer patients can deconvolute cellular composition and identify cancer-specific methylation changes from circulating […]