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Ever get that feeling that you forgot something? Well maybe you did, but it doesn't have to be recent epigenetics research if you scope out our Headlines each week.

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Oh Sugar! Gestational Fructose Exposure Linked to Long-Term Brain DNA Methylation Changes

February 16, 2018

Here at EpiGenie, we don’t like to sugar-coat our headlines. The sickly-sweet truth is that fructose can be pretty bad for your health. Fructose has become a common additive in many foods in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. Sugary drinks are one of the most common forms. Heavy soft drink consumption is linked to […]

Epigenetic Aging Analysis Suggests That TERT Isn´t the Anti-aging Target You Are Looking For!

February 13, 2018

This isn’t some sort of Jedi mind trick, we promise, but TERT may not be the anti-aging target you are looking for! TERT, or telomerase reverse transcriptase, plays an essential role in the elongation and maintenance of telomeres and as telomeres shorten with age, many surmise that activation of TERT represents an exciting approach to […]

Epigenetic Editing Misses the Mark: dCas9-DNMT3A Causes Off-Target Genome-Wide DNA Hypermethylation

February 12, 2018

While we’ve been captivated by the powerful applications of precision epigenetic editing via deactivated Cas9 (dCas9), we’ve also been mesmerized by the fact that epigenetic editing doesn’t always work as expected. Building on our need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, new findings from the lab of Alexander Meissner at […]

SunTag Casts Light on iPSC Reprogramming

February 6, 2018

While the DNA editing function of CRISPR/Cas9 systems may appear to hog the limelight, we believe that a new SunTag approach for CRISPR/Cas9-mediated induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) reprogramming via epigenome editing deserves its day in the sun! The exciting reprogramming strategy utilizes an endonuclease dead Cas9 (dCas9) fused to a repetitive protein scaffold known […]

Like a Fine Wine, Histone Variant H2A.Z Represses Memories and Accumulates with Age!

February 6, 2018

While aging works wonders for the taste of our ever-accumulating wine collection, the passage of the years is not as kind to our memories! To fully decipher the processes underlying learning and memory differences in the aging brain, the lab of Iva Zovkic at the University of Toronto Mississauga (Canada) recently expanded on past work […]

Epigenetic and Mitochondrial Clocks Synchronously Accelerate with Bipolar Disorder

January 18, 2018

A wise man once said that time is relative, and while physics was on his mind, it seems that biology should have been as well. For instance, patients with bipolar disorder suffer from accelerated aging. However, examinations of telomere length have given mixed results, and this inspired the lab of Joao Quevedo in the University […]

H3K4 Mono-Methylation Means More at Most Enhancers

January 16, 2018

People can have some pretty strange tastes. From mayonnaise on fries to syrup on spaghetti, there’s no accounting for personal preference. Proteins can have some interesting preferences too, where some regions of the genome look better than others. To get at these preferences, a recent publication from the Laboratory of Bing Ren at UC San […]

Single-Cell DNA Methylomes Reveal the Reprograming Secrets of Early Human Embryos

January 16, 2018

You’ve heard before that timing is everything, and this is doubly true in developmental biology. New research out of Fuchou Tang’s lab (Peking University, Beijing) singles in on the timing of methylation changes during embryonic development, and exposes the delicate epigenetic dance of global demethylation and targeted remethylation. Tang’s lab is no stranger to embryonic […]

YY1 Drives Enhancers and Promoters Loopy!

January 15, 2018

Cell culture hood in disarray? Favorite coffee cup missing? Internet running slow? What exactly drives you loopy in the laboratory?! Recently, the lab of Richard A. Young (Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, USA) has been driven round the bend in their quest to understand what controls the DNA looping process that brings together enhancers […]

TET Proteins: Defending Differentiation by denying de novo Methylation!

December 13, 2017

I don´t overeat! I’m not lazy! I’m not eating the agar plates when I´m working in the lab late, honest! Psychologists consider denial as one of our most primitive defense mechanisms and recent studies of epigenetic defense mechanisms in embryonic stem cells (ESCs) by the labs of Olivier Elemento (Weill Cornell Medical College) and Danwei […]