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

Expressed Long Non-coding RNAs Snitch on Tissue-specific Enhancers

February 11, 2015

Predicting tissue-specific enhancers is a tricky business. While histone marks such as H3K4me1 and binding of p300 are good enhancer predictors, pointing out which enhancers are tissue-specific is more of a challenge. That is, of course, unless you have PreSTIGE – an algorithm developed by the Scacheri lab that identifies tissue-specific enhancers by combining H3K4me1 […]

Stem Cells Take the Sting out of Radiotherapy

February 11, 2015

Radiotherapy is an important and effective tool in the war against cancer, but its use for treating brain tumors brings with it unwanted side effects that can cause long term suffering to the patient. Radiation induces the depletion of oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) which leads to the loss of the protective myelin sheath that covers […]

Culture Shock: The Transition to Transformed Cell Alters the Methylome

February 10, 2015

Whether it’s making the monumental move to high school, switching jobs or experiencing the culture shock from moving countries, adjusting to a new environment isn’t always easy. Often we have to make concessions and tradeoffs, the extent of which is very much dependent on the type of environment we find ourselves in. It turns out […]

Turn on Your Genes with a Helping Hand from CRISPR-Cas9

February 10, 2015

We all know that the genome editing superhero CRISPR-Cas9 is a master of modifying the genome, but a recent paper from Zhang lab shows that it is more than just a one-trick pony. This latest research boosts the previously developed CRISPR-Cas9 transcriptional activators both in terms of the level of gene induction and in the […]

Cell Organelles Trip the Light Fantastic with Optogenetics

February 10, 2015

The future is looking bright for optogenetics – a technique which uses light to control cellular processes. Following on from a previous illuminating study covered here at Epigenie (Shedding Light on Stem Cell Therapy for Parkinson’s with Optogenetics), another group of researchers have utilized optogenetics in a novel manner – the light-mediated control of sub-cellular […]

SynBioLGDB: A Gateway for Logical Biology

February 9, 2015

Electrical engineering is a strong contender for the central analogy of synthetic biology. Synthetic biologists often think of electrical circuits when designing gene networks, and logic gates are central to the metaphor. Biological logic gates can be difficult to design from scratch, however, and they can’t just be bought at Radio Shack, even before it […]

Review: Crosslinking-Immunoprecipitation (CLIP) Methods

February 8, 2015

RNA-protein interactions are key to understanding human health and disease. Crosslinking-immunoprecipitation (CLIP) and related technologies are powerful tools for characterizing these interactions. Since their introduction in 2008 (Licatalosi et al., 2008), CLIP-based approaches have been applied to prominent RNA research fields such as HIV and cancer. Recently, Sebla Kutluay and colleagues used CLIP to characterize […]

Epigenetic Clock Goes from Analog to iWatch

February 6, 2015

Tick tock…we all know that life is a battle against the inevitability of time. But wouldn’t it be great if you could get a real idea of how your cells are aging? It may just help make 20 the new 30, that is when it comes to your chance of death. And that’s the ambitious […]

DNMT1 Depletion Helps Hunt for Heritable Methylation

February 5, 2015

Sometimes it takes a special kind of guy to get the job done and when the job is to keep imprinted genes differentially methylated, that guy is DNMT1. An international group of researchers led by Jacquetta Trasler in Canada set out to exploit this fact in order to identify yet unknown imprinted genomic sequences. Several […]

Keeping Tabs on Off-Target Effects of Genome Editing

February 5, 2015

While the fashion and music tastes of the late 1980’s was rather questionable, it was a time of historic technological and societal change. Between the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the rise of the global computer network that we now call internet, a small group of researchers succeeded for the first time in generating […]