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Separating Cellular Best Buddies to Understand Epigenetic Dysregulation in Alzheimer’s Disease

August 6, 2018

Much like Laurel and Hardy, Bert and Ernie, and Pinky and the Brain, neurons and glia are firm friends and are seldom encountered in isolation. The more numerous glia support and protect their neural chums, helping them to conduct nerve impulses; however, their close companionship and disparate numbers can lead to analytical problems! Research into […]

Chill Out with Dad: Sperm DNA Methylation Changes in Response to Paternal Cold Exposure

July 31, 2018

When you think of the ideal place to live, most of us yearn for the tropics. But it turns out there may be some extra benefits to living in a cold climate (and not just lower rent!). New research from an international collaboration led by the lab of Dr. Christian Wolfrum at ETH Zurich may […]

Epigenetic Teamwork Makes the Stem Cell Dream Work!

July 30, 2018

Many years before the beginning of the Common Era, the ancient Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle first exclaimed that the “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”. Now, collaborative research led by Wei Li and Margaret A. Goodell (Baylor College of Medicine, Texas, USA) that sought to describe the interplay of epigenetic modifiers […]

Sweet Success! DNA Hydroxymethylation Link Between Diabetes and Cancer Discovered!

July 25, 2018

Patients with diabetes do not get a sweet deal; the long-term complications associated with high blood sugar levels include cardiovascular disease, stroke, eye damage, kidney disease, and foot ulcers. Additionally, diabetic patients suffer from a higher risk of developing cancer, although quite how prolonged high blood sugar levels drives genetic and/or epigenetic alterations towards tumorigenesis […]

Flipping the EpiSwitch on Chromosome Conformation as a Diagnostic Tool for ALS

July 17, 2018

Looking to get switched on to new uses of epigenetics in the clinic? Check out EpiSwitch™, a platform for developing chromatin conformation diagnostics. One of the biggest challenges in genetic medicine is disease heterogeneity, both in terms of getting a diagnosis and determining the best treatment course. Often, genetic changes can only account for a […]

Sorry Guys, Higher Placental H3K27me3 Levels Protect Female Brains from Prenatal Stress

July 15, 2018

While self-help books may suggest that women are from Mars and men are from Venus, exciting new findings demonstrate that the study of epigenetic modifications offers an astronomically better explanation for the differences between males and females. Inspired by research indicating that males suffer from greater vulnerability to prenatal stress and certain psychiatric conditions, the […]

A microRNA and Histone Methylation Cascade Links TGF-β Signaling to Senescence and Aging

July 10, 2018

While knowing the start- and end-points of a journey is all well and fine, without studying the route taken, we may miss some exciting opportunities; a drink in an enchanting country pub, a picturesque stroll by the shores of a beautiful lake, or as a recent study has demonstrated, a potential treatment for aging? Let’s […]

Junk Drawer No More: LINE-1 RNA Functions as a Chromatin Scaffold Critical to Early Development

June 26, 2018

Do you have a junk drawer at your house? Perhaps it’s full of old take-out menus, dead batteries, rubber bands, and other purposeless things? Since their discovery, transposable elements, including the LINE-1 retrotransposon, have been relegated to the “junk drawer” of the human genome. At best LINE-1 has been called useless, and at worst it […]

dCas9-Suntag-DNMT3A Outshines the Off-Target Effects of Direct dCas9-DNMT3A Fusions

June 25, 2018

While even a technology with a future as bright as epigenome editing can have its cold day in the sun, the Suntag system has just cleared the clouds over a growing pain of epigenetic editing: the global off-target effects of dCas9-DNMT3A direct fusion constructs. To cure our epigenetic editing blues, the lab of Ryan Lister […]

Single-Cell Epigenetics of Human Embryos is No Longer too Cool for scCOOL-seq!

June 24, 2018

The single cells of the developing human embryo are kinda awesome, but maybe they’ve grown a tad arrogant, perhaps a little “too cool for school”? They always hang around alone or in small cliques of similar cells, while the hippest scientists have only recently developed techniques, such as scNOMe-seq and scNMT-seq, trendy enough to begin […]