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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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Meta-Analysis Reveals Grim Reaper is Keeping an Eye On Your Epigenetic Clock

October 19, 2016

They say ‘Seasons don’t fear the reaper’, and while the festivities of this season certainly favor the reaper, most of us dread the reaper’s favor. Our understanding of how to avoid that favor is now improving, thanks to some new insight from the epigenetic clock-watching lab of Steve Horvath at UCLA. The epigenetic clock consists […]

Cancer Stem Cells Refuse to be Linked to Linker Histone H1.0

October 19, 2016

It is widely known that tumor lesions harbor diverse subpopulations of cell types each genetically and phenotypically unique. However, it is not always clear which cell types are actually promoting or sustaining the tumor. Typically, tumors consist of two class of cells—a subpopulation of cells that are fully differentiated and possess little to none tumor […]

Controlling Gene Circuits With sgRNA-RNA Aptamer Hybrids

October 10, 2016

Earlier this year, Chris Voigt’s lab wrote an automated composer for synthetic gene circuits, which can design circuits to do what you want, all the way down to the DNA sequence. As good musicians know, however, the work doesn’t stop once the composer’s ink dries on the page – the next step is to find […]

Reporter of Genomic Methylation Delivers Imprinting and Epigenome Editing Insights

October 3, 2016

Here at EpiGenie we like to think of ourselves as reporters of genomic methylation, but two new studies from the lab of Rudolf Jaenisch at MIT give us a run for our money and demonstrate the utility of their reporter of genomic methylation (RGM). Using RGM, the talented group brings forth a deeper understanding of […]

m6A Enables XIST’s Repressive Existence

September 27, 2016

Life can be hard out there for an X chromosome, particularly when faced with a well-known molecular form of sexual discrimination. The key to this repressive environment and resulting existential crisis is X-inactive specific transcript (XIST), a long non-coding (lnc)RNA known to undergo modifications such as cytosine methylation. However, RNA methylation is a rapidly evolving […]

Proteomic Analysis of Aging MSCs Reveals New Targets to Enhance Musculoskeletal Therapies

September 27, 2016

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are surely the “workhorses” of both the body and the regenerative medicine field. They display multiple advantageous characteristics, including the ability to differentiate into musculoskeletal tissues, that make MSCs the go-to cell type for tissue-engineering solutions for disease/age-related disorders. Furthermore, many tissues require the proper on-going function of tissue-resident MSCs to […]

eBook: ChIP Seq Data Analysis Tools & Databases

September 13, 2016

Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) is a powerful workflow for analysis of chromatin structure. The antibody-based pulled down of protein-DNA interactions is only half the process. Once the genomic regions bound by a protein are enriched and sequenced, bioinformatics tools and pipelines are necessary to identify, characterize, and compare these regions between samples. This ‘dry’ side of the ChIP workflow is […]

Multiplexed CRISPR sgRNAs: Express One Get One Free

September 13, 2016

For all the focus on making CRISPR more accurate, effective, compact, and versatile, one key feature has remained elusive: the two-for-one special. In a way, it’s ironic that CRISPR multiplexing – i.e., expressing multiple sgRNAs from the same promoter to target multiple DNA sites – is not more straightforward. After all, natural CRISPR arrays are […]

DNA Methylation Detects Ovarian Cancer’s Tissue of Origin

September 13, 2016

While epigenetic variation underlies the origin of many cancers, underlying epigenetic similarities can reveal cancer’s tissue of origin. High-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSC) is the most common and serious type of epithelial ovarian cancer. However, there are two competing hypotheses about which tissue HGSC arises from. Ovarian surface epithelia (OSE) has been implicated, but the […]

Can’t Remember What’s Stressing You Out? Blame Histone Acetylation

September 2, 2016

We can all relate to the side effects of severe stress in one way or the other. Severe stress affects us in many ways and contributes immensely to many pathological issues. One side effect of stress is spatial memory impairment. Whereas non-epigenetic basis of how stress impacts our spatial memory has been documented, no such […]