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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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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 […]

CRISPR and Stem Cells Team Up Against HIV

November 17, 2014

To this day Timothy Ray Brown, otherwise known as the Berlin Patient, is the only person cured after infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The cure came in a fortuitous form; a stem cell transplant used to treat his leukemia came from a donor with natural resistant to HIV. Soon after, researchers discovered that […]

Coffee Gets Your Baby’s Heart Going…the Wrong Way

November 13, 2014

There’s no denying the power of coffee, it seems that without it humanity wouldn’t have the concentration or energy needed to tackle the complexities of the epigenome. But as researchers from the University of Florida show, with consumption comes responsibility and a molecule powerful enough to help you complete the 180 from bed to breakfast, may […]

A New Methylation Signature: CpG Ravines as a CpG Island Sub-Type

November 13, 2014

Islands and shores are always on the mind at this time of the year, but just because winter is coming doesn’t mean we need to put the rest of the CpGenome on the shelf. CpG Shores might be the regulatory master of CpG Islands but new features keep emerging, like CpG Canyons, and now a new sub-type of CpG Islands is coming […]

In the Epitranscriptome Clusters of Co-Methylation Define m6A’s Function

November 13, 2014

Lately, at the EpiGenie HQ, we’ve had our mind on methylation and our money on RNA. Not just limited to DNA or Cytosine, we’ve seen that N6-methyladenosine (m6A) is a highly dynamic mark in RNA that has a critical role in stem cell differentiation. Now researchers from the Northwestern Polytechnical University in China have set out to find how m6A dynamics work on […]