Inside the DNA Methylation-Chromatin TangoApril 1, 2009There has been a ton of interesting data on the relationship between DNA methylation, histone modifications, and transcriptional control in recent years. We love hearing about these advances at conferences, but die-hard chromatin biologists tend to rattle off histone modification combos that sound like a football quarterback about to take a snap “H3K27-trimethyl, K9, hike…,” […]
Promoter Targeted Small RNAs Lay a Big Smack Down on Gene Expression.March 31, 2009Sometimes to get the correct result, a researcher needs to knock a gene down. Not just a little knockdown, but like a Mike Tyson knockdown! (well, at least back in the days before the whole ear-biting thing.) Some clever scientists at The Scripps Research Institute may have found a way to do just that. By […]
RNAi Rescues DNA Methylation DefectsMarch 25, 2009Nowadays it seems like “interference” carries such negative connotations. RNAs aren’t really big meddlers. In fact, it’s RNAi that’s protecting genomes against the transgenerational loss of DNA methylation. A team of researchers in France and Spain has demonstrated that in Arabidopsis, the RNA interference (RNAi) machinery can remethylate target sequences that were hypomethylated by mutation […]
miR-101: RNA Guardian Of The Genome?March 9, 2009MicroRNA-101 (miR-101) is rapidly earning a place in the “Who’s Who” of tumor suppressor genes. In November, we told you how The Little RNA that Could wallops prostate cancer by repressing the histone methyltransferase EZH2. Now researchers at the University of Southern California have shown that miR-101 plays a similar role in the suppression of […]
Two Epigenetic Drugs Join Forces with Cisplatin to Knock Out CancerMarch 9, 2009Just when it seems that scientists are winning the fight against cancer, tumors hit below the belt by developing resistance to chemotherapies. But researchers at the University of Glasgow and TopoTarget Prolifix Ltd. have shown that delivering a 1-2 punch of epigenetic drugs could allow the chemotherapeutic agent cisplatin to knock out resistant tumors. Cisplatin, […]
ESC Pluripotency Players Take To RESTMarch 2, 2009The lab gloves came off in a recent Nature exchange on the putative role of the transcriptional repressor, REST, in embryonic stem cell pluripotency. In the left corner, Singh and colleagues, conducting experiments out of MD Anderson in the Lone Star State, published data in Nature back in May, 2008 indicating that REST may control […]
miRNA Regulation Checks and Balances in Organ AdhesionFebruary 23, 2009We’re all asking ourselves these days, “But who regulates the regulators?” For miRNA, the answer may just be a consortium of genes both living and dead. A group of Toronto researchers exogenously expressed versican 3’UTR (a potential target for miR-199a*) hooked up to a reporter construct. While expression of the luciferase or GFP reporter was […]
HITS-CLIP Cracks The FOX2 Splicing CodeFebruary 23, 2009As crafty as its animal namesake, the cell-type-specific RNA splicing regulator FOX2 slips in and out of the transcriptome, causing the inclusion of one exon here or the exclusion of another there, with no apparent rhyme or reason. However, researchers at the Salk Institute and the University of California, San Diego recently outsmarted FOX2 by […]
Oncogenic Viruses MethylomesFebruary 17, 2009To methylate, or not to methylate? That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the genome to suffer the onslaughts and diversions of oncogenic DNA viruses or, by inactivating, disguise them (from immune surveillance). When researchers used bisulfite sequencing to examine the methylomes of three double-stranded DNA viruses (Human Papilloma Viruses (HPV) 16 and 18, […]
Oh, Behave! How Chromatin Remodeling Regulates Behavioral ResponseFebruary 17, 2009Did your behavior at the lab holiday party elicit whispered comments, furtive glances, and snide snickers from co-workers the next day? Although we don’t know exactly what possessed you to dance on the boss’s coffee table wearing your DNA necktie as a headband, researchers have shown that some physiological and pathological behaviors result from epigenetic […]