Headlines Archives - EpiGenie | Epigenetics, Stem Cell, and Synthetic Biology News

Headlines

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.

Search Articles

Gene Drives: Wormholes of Biology

January 8, 2016

Gene drives have been hitting the news quite a bit lately, generating a lot of hype, hope, and some hand-wringing. They are a relatively new concept, so it’s well worth a quick road trip into gene drive history, domestication, safety, and practical challenges. Gene Drives? In essence, gene drives are the wormholes of biology. They look […]

Human Pluripotent Stem Cells (hPSCs) Elevate Performance with Chimera Formation

January 8, 2016

Ask Usain Bolt, Yelena Isinbayeva, or Lindsey Vonn and they will tell you that Gold is the only thing that matters. To them, it came in the guise of an Olympic medal (or two), but human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) have been in the hunt for a slightly different type of gold to prove their […]

The Early Days of CRISPR with Dr. Blake Weidenheft

December 28, 2015

Interview with Dr. Blake Weidenheft at Keystone Symposia’s Precision Genome Engineering and Synthetic Biology: Designing Genomes and Pathways The Early Days of CRISPR I was one of the earlier people involved in the CRISPR– in CRISPR biology. And so we didn’t really come at this with the intent to try to develop some new genome […]

Retroviral lincRNA Regulates miRNA Pluripotency Switch

December 28, 2015

Everyone knows the old saying that “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”, but what are you supposed to do when life gives you a genome full of retroviral ncRNAs? Nature seems to think it should evolve elaborate regulatory elements for your complex development. Two-thirds of the 10,000 long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNA) found so […]

Going Direct: Reprogramming without iPSCs in Cell Therapies

December 21, 2015

The generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) represents one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of our times, bringing us to the brink of patient-specific stem cell-based therapies. The “simple” generation process involves the forced expression of transcription factor genes in differentiated cells taken from the patient (normally skin cells) to “kick-start” the pluripotency-associated […]

Stress Accelerates Epigenetic Ageing

December 18, 2015

The epigenetic clock has developed faster than the iWatch: it can predict biological age from select CpGs, which when compared with chronological age, gives a metric known as Δ-age. The greater the difference, the greater the acceleration of epigenetic age, which indicates variation in the rate of senescence between people. To understand this variation and […]

A TAD Closer to Understanding 3D Chromatin Structure

December 15, 2015

Interview with Dr. Jennifer Phillips-Cremins at Keystone Symposia’s Precision Genome Engineering and Synthetic Biology. My lab is really focused on understanding the epigenetic mechanisms that regulate early brain development. And the, sort of traditional way of studying epigenetic marks, is to zoom in and really focus on a particular modification at a precise location in […]

Directed Evolution in Synthetic Biology with Dr. Andrew Ellington

December 12, 2015

Interview with Dr. Andrew Ellington at Keystone Symposia’s Precision Genome Engineering and Synthetic Biology: Designing Genomes and Pathways Parts, Circuits, and Systems So in directed evolution, what you’re generally trying to do is to optimize function. And that can mean a lot of different things. But if we keep within the synthetic biology paradigm, we […]

Automating Pluripotent Stem Cell Culture – The Rise of the Robots?

December 4, 2015

They help cook dinner, clean the dishes, and sweep up afterward. They also build our cars, help us explore space, and now they may be on the verge of aiding in highly complex tasks in the laboratory. In particular, robot-based automation is being explored as a means to enhance efficiency in laboratories studying pluripotent stem […]

Epigenetic Diversity Teams Up with Genetics to Explain Complex Phenotypes

December 4, 2015

If epigenetics has taught us anything, it’s that genes are not our destiny. Even though aberrant patterns of epigenetic marks have been caught at the scene of the crime in many disease states, we know relatively little about their natural variation and how this influences human health. That may be about to change however with […]