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A CRISPR-Cas9 Pipeline for Efficiently Editing Blood Stem Cells

November 3, 2016

When it comes to gene therapy, blood diseases are prime candidates. Blood cells are constantly turning over, so you can quickly fix the blood supply if you replace the blood-producing stem cells in bone marrow; i.e., hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells (HSPCs). Transplanting marrow from a healthy donor is one approach, but a match can be difficult […]

Intergenerational Transmission of Extracellular dsRNA Filmed in C. elegans

November 1, 2016

Seeing is believing, whether it be a topic as hot as the upcoming presidential election or intergenerational epigenetic effects and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. While exciting evidence on the role of sperm RNA in mammals has begun to accumulate thanks to the labs of Mansuy, Bale, and Rando, an elegant C. elegans study from the lab […]

ChIP-SICAP – Your New Favorite Assay Flavor?

November 1, 2016

Maple-bacon, chocolate, and hedgehog? The list of potato chip flavors keeps on getting longer and crazier. Also getting longer is the list of different ChIP assay varieties (that’s chromatin immunoprecipitation for the uninitiated), with the most interesting new “taste sensation” emanating from the lab of Jeroen Krijgsveld (DFKZ/EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany). While chips are good for […]

Variation in CpG Methylation is Tied to Biological Aging

October 19, 2016

There aren’t many things in this world that we can be certain about, but aging marks an all too important exception. Towards the goal of understanding the marks of this unavoidable process, we’ve seen the epigenetic clock, which looks at CpG sites that are certainly differentially methylated as we age. However, a new perspective to […]

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 […]