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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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Hearts on Chips

March 24, 2015

Chips, in most incarnations, are bad for the heart. Whether you’re frying them, baking them into cookies, or carrying one on your shoulder, chips are not cardiologist-approved. A new paper from Kevin Healy’s lab aims to mend this relationship with a microfluidic chip that is able to coax human induced stem cells into beating 3D […]

iPSCs and CRISPR the Dynamic Duo of Regenerative Medicine

March 23, 2015

Laurel and Hardy, Peanut Butter and Jelly, Batman and Robin – can we now add iPSCs (induced pluripotent stem cells) and CRISPR to the list of famous duos? Linzhao Cheng (John Hopkins) certainly thinks so, and in a recently study his group have demonstrated how this combination of technologies may lead to an effective cell treatment […]

5hmC: a Helping Hand in Drug Addiction

March 23, 2015

While there’s no doubting that one month of continuous cocaine exposure is going to have an effect on the brain, it seems that some of the molecular culprits behind the response and long-term effects are 5hmC and the TET protein family. An international research team studying addiction via cocaine show that repeat exposure downregulates the TET machinery in the brain’s reward centre, the nucleus […]

Novel Primate- and Tissue Specific miRNAs with Dr Isidore Rigoutsos

March 17, 2015

In this interview Dr Isidore Rigoutsos discusses his recent paper ‘Analysis of 13 cell types reveals evidence for the expression of numerous novel primate- and tissue-specific microRNAs‘ published in PNAS, February 2015. This paper shows the presence of many more miRNAs than previously thought and uncovers that the majority of these are in fact, cell-type […]

Our Favorite Findings from the Epigenomic Roadmap

March 10, 2015

For those of you with a keen eye, you’ll have already noticed the mass of Epigenomic Roadmap Studies published in Nature in February. In order to help you navigate this mountain of results we’ve highlighted some of our favorite findings from this collection of papers. Here’s our Top Five Findings: Enhancer-like Elements Take Center Stage in […]

New Rising STARs of Transcriptional Activation

March 9, 2015

If you can pronounce CRISPR, you know RNA-mediated gene control has been a rising star in synthetic biology. In principle, RNA regulation allows gene circuits to have many more independent control switches than traditional protein transcription factors. CRISPR has turned out to be a great system for RNA-guided gene repression, but it hasn’t been as […]

A cHi-C Way of Capturing Chromatin Conformation

March 9, 2015

Identifying cancer risk loci is like trying to find a key you lost somewhere in your apartment. You know that it’s there and by combining experience with indistinct recollection you can even narrow it down to a few square meters. Now imagine you not only have to find the key but also map all the […]

Gene Expression Comes Full CircRNA

March 9, 2015

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a diverse RNA species that regulate gene expression in some funky ways, like functioning as super absorbent miRNA sponges in mammalian cells. However, they also seem to be particularly relevant to the brain. Recent research adds a new function to this ‘outside of the box’ method of regulating gene expression by observing circRNAs […]

Express Yourself with Light-activatable CRISPR-Cas9

February 26, 2015

Guess what? It seems that blue light has a lot more to offer than just helping with your winter time blues. It could also be just what your transcriptional activation system needs. Synthetic biology has a lot to offer omics beyond genome editing and recent work from multiple groups is putting Cas9 in a different spotlight. CRISPR/Cas9 […]

m⁶Ajor New Function for MicroRNAs in RNA Methylation

February 20, 2015

It’s no secret that microRNAs are pretty busy molecules. A single microRNA can regulate the expression of several, maybe even hundreds, of transcripts. If that wasn’t enough, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing now add another function to this packed list of duties: the control of m6A RNA methylation, which is emerging as an […]