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EpiGenie Book Review: Epigenetics in Psychiatry

December 3, 2014

Epigenetics in Psychiatry brings together a collection of researchers in the field of neuroepigenetics to provide insight into research on the role of epigenetics in a range of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder and suicide. Not content with covering only these topics it also provides information on the techniques and animal models […]

Developmental Windows: Dutch Hunger Winter

December 2, 2014

Famine is never a good thing, particularly if you’re a developing fetus. And while the role of maternal diet in fetal programming is nothing new to the world of DNA methylation, there’s still a lot to be learned about the subtle variations. When it comes to growth and metabolism, timing of the environmental exposure appears is important, […]

DNMTs Divide Their Dynamic DNA Methylation Labour

November 27, 2014

Splitting up work amongst the team is always a sound strategy for success. We’ve seen that the TET family likes to divide it’s labour and now, not so suprisingly, the ever so famous DNA methyltransferases have also been caught working smart. Researchers from the Center for Individualized Medicine at the Mayo Clinic used acute and combined depletions […]

Embryonic Stem Cell Model Highlights Importance of Histone Mutation in Childhood Tumorigenesis

November 26, 2014

Childhood cancers are truly devastating diseases; they cause major loss of young lives due to the distinct lack of treatment options stemming from the limited access to tumor tissues. Hopefully, a promising new study published in Science will change this. Researchers from the laboratory Viviane Tabar at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA […]

Boosting Bone by Exercising your Stem Cells

November 25, 2014

How do you do it? Running? Boxing? Jane Fonda work out videos? Whatever the method, we all need exercise to keep our bodies and minds healthy and functional, and it now turns out that stem cells benefit from exercise too! Researchers have demonstrated that remote mechanical stimulation of transplanted mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) is a potentially […]

CRISPR Heavyweight Cas9 K.O.’s 30 Million Bases

November 25, 2014

Cas9 has already been shown to be able to knock out up to kilobase-size fragments of DNA, making it a big hitter in the world of genome editing. But one of the biggest enemies for researchers using such tools is the diploid karyotype, which impairs the study of the effects of a mutation or of […]

New Dimensions for Pluripotent Cell Differentiation

November 23, 2014

The recent Hollywood trend of adapting much beloved movies from two-dimensional (2D) into 3-dimensional (3D) offerings hasn’t met with the expected fanfare and applause. However, strategies which have adapted pluripotent stem cell (PSC) differentiation strategies from 2D to 3D have created some masterpieces of epic proportions. Differentiating PSCs as adherent cell monolayers is a commonly […]

On the Trail of Naïve Human Pluripotent Cells

November 23, 2014

The creation of pluripotent stem-cell lines from early embryos has enabled the indefinite capture in vitro of one of nature’s most fascinating but fleeting faces. Yet, not all embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are alike. Mouse ESCs are free from differentiation bias and epigenetic restriction, whereas human ESCs have already made some fundamental developmental decisions. But […]

Two New Players for Better Differential Peak Detection in ChIP-Seq

November 22, 2014

Sometimes bioinformatics can seem a bit mystical, particularly when a tool arrives that makes you wonder what you were wasting your time doing before it. ChIP-seq is no stranger to this world and as a driver of a large proportion of epigenomic experimentation we’re also no stranger to the challenges of processing ChIP-seq data and peak calling. One of […]

Direct Reprogramming of Neural Stem Cells – A Step Closer to the Clinic?

November 18, 2014

“Well there goes another couple of thousand brain cells…” – a common thought after a beer, a glass of wine, or an hour or so of television, or maybe more if it’s reality TV. But can we replace these lost cells? Millions of college kids would like to, but there’s also a long list of […]