One Man’s Junk DNA is Another’s Intronic microRNASeptember 3, 2013Introns have a bad rap these days. Sequestered with the rest of the (epi)genome in the term ‘junk’ DNA’; A reductionist way of describing 95% of our beloved genome as useless. But as new evidence keeps pointing out, introns and ‘non-coding’ regions actually code for most of the genomes products and/or function. In recently published […]
Webinar: Life Long Changes in DNA Methylation & ncRNAs in Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)August 22, 2013Western University’s Ben Laufer (Ph.D. Candidate) discusses how bioinformatic software was used to establish that even moderate exposure to alcohol during pregnancy, equivalent to a few beers every now and then, can produce profound and heritable variations in development, behaviour, and learning that are maintained in the exposed fetus for a lifetime by altered epigenetic […]
R-loops: RNA-DNA Hybrids Making Noise on Silenced GenesAugust 21, 2013Prader-Willi syndrome and Angelman syndrome are like two-peas-in-a-pod, the textbook cases of the power of genomic imprinting. However, some consider them to be distinct genetic disorders that are grouped together, as Dr. Janine LaSalle (UC Davis) puts it; “Only because of the shared chromosomal location of deletions to 15q11-13 and ‘quirky’ oppositely imprinted inheritance patterns.” […]
Genomic Editing and lncRNAs Team Up Against Down’s SyndromeAugust 20, 2013According to breakthrough research, families affected by Down’s Syndrome may one day have the opportunity to alleviate many of the syndrome’s harmful aspects. Regardless of the ethical concerns around this treatment, which we won’t debate here, we think just the approach and mechanism developed within this study are worthy of a shout out. A cunning […]
Purity By Design – Zymo Research Cleans Up DNA for Epigenetic AnalysisAugust 6, 2013Question the design of your spin column. All spin columns are not created equal, and designs from some other companies may result in buffer retention, even after centrifugation. The buffer carry-over can contain high concentrations of salts, detergents, and other buffer components that are eventually eluted from the column along with your DNA or RNA […]
CRISPRi: The User-Friendly Transcriptional RepressorJuly 25, 2013Usually when you think of the immune system it isn’t at the level of our bacterial friends. But “prokaryotes have evolved diverse RNA-mediated systems that use short CRISPR RNAs (crRNAs) and Cas (CRISPR-associated) proteins to detect and defend against invading DNA elements” This system, also known as the CRISPR/Cas system, is a prokaryotic immune system […]
Placental miRNAs Predict Infant BehaviorJuly 18, 2013Many parents consider their children’s behavior to be a bit of a mystery, (just ask anyone who has shared a plane ride with an unruly toddler) but new miRNA research hints that it may soon be possible to predict your child’s behavioral traits by a simple non-invasive test right after birth. A fortune telling team […]
EpiGenie Guide: RNA Immunoprecipitation (RIP) and BeyondJuly 10, 2013RNA binding proteins (RBPs) play important roles in many cellular and disease processes, together with their DNA binding brethren, they compromise almost one quarter of annotated human genes. The tools used to understand when and where these proteins bind and interact with RNAs in the cell have lagged behind those for protein-DNA interactions, although they […]
A Great Start to RNA-Seq: Zymo Research’s RNA Clean & Concentrator™-5July 1, 2013With every high-tech advance in the methods used for RNA analysis , the need for extremely pure RNA input samples becomes even more crucial. The RNA Clean & Concentrator™-5 (RCC™-5) Kit from Zymo Research packs high-performance into a fast and easy format that enables even the most demanding methods, including RNA-Seq. RNA Clean and Concentrator™-5 […]
The Darkside of Epigenetic PlasticityJune 26, 2013Sure, genes get mutated in cancers, but the epigenome gets messed-up too. In fact, two researchers argue in a recent review that a “dysregulated epigenome” that’s too plastic and flexible could itself lead to cancer. Andrew Feinberg and Winston Timp, both from the Center for Epigenetics at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, wrote the […]