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

A SIRT-an Link Between Metabolism, Stem Cell Function and Epigenetics

January 27, 2015

In our younger years our rampant metabolism meant we could eat what we wanted with little or no consequences. However, as we get older, our metabolism somehow gets “reprogrammed”, meaning all that yummy bad stuff does nothing for our energy levels or our waistlines! But why do we face this fate? A delectable new study […]

Bacterial Kryptonite Uncovered in the Biological Dark Matter Mines

January 27, 2015

Public health has a looming, if slow-simmering, crisis. Antibiotics, which revolutionized health care in the 20th century, are losing their punch. Evolution, it turns out, is pretty effective at producing things that don’t die. Accordingly, bacteria are evolving resistance to our antibiotic arsenal, and more people are suffering from previously-treatable infections. Meanwhile, the pipeline of […]

A Good Friend is Forever: DNMTs and Histone Complexes

January 26, 2015

It’s not always easy to find good friends, but recent work has found that the de novo DNA methyltransferases DNMT3A2 and DNMT3B1 are far from socially awkward. Baubec et al. from the Swiss team lead by Dirk Schübeler uncovered some companions of these DNMTs by profiling their binding in embryonic stem cells (ESCs) through streptavidin […]

The Latest and Greatest: A Genome-Editing Cautionary Tale

January 26, 2015

Genome-editing techniques, including CRISPR-Cas9 and TALENs, have leapt into the limelight through their ability to perform feats such as creating genetically engineered monkeys, ‘curing’ a human related disease in mice, and taking out huge sections of a genome. The two systems are both based on nucleases, with the CRISPR-Cas9 system using the bacterially derived Cas-9 nuclease […]

Intergenerational Epigenetic Effects of Dad’s Diet

January 23, 2015

The effect of epigenetic marks across generations has helped bring epigenetics to the public eye like never before. The health implications are enormous and so is the contribution to basic science, particularly evolution. However, one important distinction is whether it is a true form of molecular inheritance, known as transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, or the shared effect […]

Active Demethylation: TET Enzymes, 5hmC, and Company

January 20, 2015

5hmC was originally discovered way back in the 50’s in bacteriophages and was first observed in mammals in the 70’s, but research into this was set back when these studies failed to replicate. And going back to the future, in 2009 two independent research groups, publishing on the same pages in science, found that this “unknown […]

Why Drugs in Dad Can Affect Your Epigenome

January 15, 2015

Some people aren’t always happy about what gets passed on from their parents. It’s great to have your Dad’s strong cheekbones but not so great to have his lactose intolerance. It turns out we may acquire even more from our fathers than we ever thought during our germ cell years. A new study from Elizabeth Thomas’s lab […]

Illuminating the Function of Stem Cell Therapy for Parkinson’s Disease

January 15, 2015

Red light means stop and green light means go? Apparently not for a few bright researchers who have recently used a novel technique to shed light on how cell replacement therapy for Parkinson’s Disease (PD) functions. Studies suggest that therapeutic success requires the functional integration of grafted dopamine releasing (DA) neurons, but this has actually been […]

Passive Demethylation Drives Development

January 15, 2015

Ever taken one of those online personality tests, such as those that tell you if you’ve got a passive or active personality? Well researchers at Stanford set out to perform such a test, not on themselves, but to uncover the ‘personality’ of demethylation during development. DNA can be demethylated actively through the TET enzyme family, or passively during DNA […]

Guide: Bisulfite-Converted DNA Amplification

January 12, 2015

Over the years, bisulfite conversion has become the most widely used method for DNA methylation analysis. It is the most convenient and effective way to map DNA methylation to individual bases. As the first step in numerous downstream analysis techniques, it is absolutely critical that the bisulfite conversion process is understood and performed well. Our […]