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CRISPR-Cas9 Gene Editing of Human Embryos: A Look at the Science

April 28, 2015

Unless you were on Mars or in the middle of a Netflix binge, you couldn’t have missed the paper that has been hitting the headlines all over the world this week – the first example of the genetic modification of human embryos. The study led by Junjiu Huang (Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou) used CRISPR-Cas9 gene […]

Boosting Transcription with a Little Help from Histone Crotonylation

April 24, 2015

Every auto enthusiast knows that if you want to maximize the performance of your car, you’ve got to have the right parts in the right combination. While sometimes you may have to completely rebuild your engine, other times all you need is to upgrade to the latest system components. In a recent article published in […]

Pioneering Transcription Factors Wiggle Towards Pluripotency

April 24, 2015

Canoes, camels, cars and catamarans have carried human pioneers far and wide; taking us to undiscovered lands to encounter unseen beauty, encouraged by the hope of fame, glory, and a lust for adventure. How pioneer transcription factors brave the inhospitable exterior of a compacted DNA-histone complex to induce transcription of tightly guarded genes is, however, […]

Human Preimplantation Embryos Go Retroviral

April 24, 2015

Our genomes are littered with tales of our evolutionary past, including infections from retroviruses that have left their mark in the vast expanses of the human genome. While most of the endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) have lost their protein coding potential, a class of human specific ERVs (HERVs) still possess intact open reading frames. Inspired by […]

At Risk of Autistic Offspring? Sperm DNA Methylation May Hold the Answer

April 23, 2015

Finding the origin of complex disease is no easy task but now it seems a seminal breakthrough has occurred. Andrew Feinberg and team at the John Hopkins University Center for Epigenetics have found a DNA methylation pattern in the sperm of fathers with an increased risk of fathering autistic children that is also present in brains […]

The Differentiation Race: Not all Cells Move at the Same Speed

April 21, 2015

Christoph Bock discusses his recent paper ‘Single-Cell DNA Methylome Sequencing and Bioinformatic Inference of Epigenomic Cell-State Dynamics‘ published in Cell Reports. Epigenetic Regulation of Cell States In this first section Christoph tells us why he is interested in studying the epigenetic regulation of cell states and how his new method helps to look at the epigenetics of […]

Mass-tering the Stem Cell Reprogramming Process

April 15, 2015

Chaotic, uncoordinated, and seemingly without rhyme or reason…no, it’s not the daily stampede towards the barista for your first coffee of the day; rather it’s the words used to describe the early stochastic phases of reprogramming differentiated cells into induced pluripotent stem cells. To bring a little order to the chaos, researchers from the laboratory […]

CRISPR Goes Back to its Roots to Fight HIV

April 14, 2015

All the cool techniques people are developing with CRISPR-Cas9 are great and all, but sometimes a repurposed natural genetic system just has to go back to its roots. If CRISPR was originally a virus defense system in bacteria, why not forget about all this genome engineering whatnot for a minute and just use it to […]

Young Mitochondria Maintain Stem Cell Self-renewal

April 14, 2015

For many commuters, good maintenance may make the difference between getting to work on time or waiting in the cold to be rescued from the roadside at 8:00 in the morning. Like any vehicle, a cell is a well-oiled machine with many parts that are continuously replaced or repaired to ensure durability. Now, new research […]

Cancer Therapy Gets a Little Personal

April 14, 2015

Just like snowflakes we are all unique (at least genetically speaking), and unfortunately for modern medicine so are our cancers. This individuality in cancers, even of the same type or subtype, means that there is no single cure-all. However, researchers, like those at the from Washington University in St. Louis and The University of Oklahoma, […]