If You Like Piña Coladas, and tRNAs: Unique Relationships Between tRFs and mRNAsMay 6, 2019It can be tough to find a significant other that checks all the boxes: smart, funny, and into epigenetics. But if you think your relationship is tough to figure out, just wait until you see the relationship between tRNA derived fragments and mRNAs. New research from the lab of Isidore Rigoutsos (Thomas Jefferson University, USA) […]
Astronomical Findings from the NASA Twin Study on the Effects of Space FlightMay 6, 2019Identical twins are known for having some pretty out of this world similarities. Picking the same clothes, feeling the other’s pain, and often going into the same careers. The latter is true for Mark and Scott Kelly, monozygotic twins who also both happen to have been trained as astronauts. Twins are a favorite model system […]
Members of the PIWI League Play Important Positions in the BrainMay 3, 2019It takes a special kind of small RNA to try out for the PIWI team. PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNA) are small, have and adenine at their 10th position, an uracil at their 5’ end, and 2’-O-methylation at their 3’ end. This unique physique helps piRNA work with PIWI proteins to defend the germline against an aggressive transposon offense, but […]
New Epigenetic Clock Offers an Evolutionary Conserved View of Aging Through Ribosomal DNA MethylationApril 27, 2019With updates and novel iterations to the “epigenetic clock” occurring at a pace faster than our smartwatches, it’s about time a new player emerged in the world of epigenetic clocks. Not only can these specialist timepieces keep track of our chronological age, but they can also tell us how environmental factors affect the pace of […]
Giving Identity to the Masses: Antisense lncRNA Transcription Facilitates DNA Demethylation to Determine Promoter ChoiceApril 21, 2019As modern technology develops, we grow increasingly connected with one another while also striving to maintain our individual identities. Although some may blame social media for our desire to be unique snowflakes just like everyone else, exciting new research demonstrates a molecular mechanism for individual neuronal identity in the brain that may just be the […]
The Relationship Between CTCF and DNA Methylation? It’s Complicated…April 16, 2019Everyone knows one of those couples who keeps getting together and breaking up, as if they’re trying to decide how much they like each other. Well the chromatin architectural protein CTCF and DNA methylation have one of those relationships, and it just got more complicated! For years, we’ve been trying to decipher whether DNA methylation always prevents […]
Sugar Sticks it to Histones and Causes Problems for Chromatin ArchitectureApril 15, 2019Many of us have been lectured by our dentist about eating those delicious, sticky candies. Now, as it turns out, those cavity-causing sugars not only stick to your teeth but can stick to your histones too! Through a non-enzymatic process known as glycation, a glucose group is covalently attached to specific amino acids, which can […]
Reactivating “Fossil” Enhancers from Embryonic Development in Adult TissuesApril 10, 2019The Jurassic Park movies got the whole world excited about resurrecting dinosaurs from fossilized DNA, but more recent findings that the half-life of DNA is only 521 years mean that dream is science fiction. So, while the finer details of dinosaur genomes may be lost in the fossil record, new work has dug up epigenomic […]
Inflammation in the Information Age: Multi-Tissue Chromatin and Transcriptional States of Mammalian AgingMarch 26, 2019We’re living in the information age―the age of supercomputers, big data, and machine learning―and the epigenetics field is capitalizing on these capabilities. New research from the lab of Anne Brunet at Stanford University harnesses the power of the ‘information age’ to provide insight on the ‘inflammation age’―that is, changes in the epigenetic landscape that lead […]
Not Just Idle Chit-chat! – Histone and RNA Methylation Crosstalk Regulates Gene ExpressionMarch 24, 2019While many see chit-chat and gossip as a tiresome but inevitable part of life, epigenetic eavesdropping has recently demonstrated that the tight regulation of gene expression relies on some close-quarters methylation crosstalk! The molecular back-and-forth uncovered occurs between the transcription elongation-associated H3K36me3 histone modification and the prevalent and essential post-transcriptional N6-methyladenosine (m6A) mRNA modification. So […]