miRNAs Help Boost Herpes Image in Prostate Cancer CommunityAugust 19, 2009The herpes virus (HSV-1) has never been well-liked in most circles. Hey, it’s hard to blame folks, what with all of the cold sores (or worse), for not wanting to get too close. But that may soon change as a team of scientists from The Prostate Centre at Vancouver General Hospital, is looking to upgrade […]
Mir-143 Slacks Off, Leaving DNMT3A To Run Wild In Colorectal CancerAugust 6, 2009We like to think of epigenetics in terms of distinct areas like chromatin, DNA methylation and non-coding RNA (heck, we’ve even divided up the EpiGenie website that way), but more and more evidence is blurring the lines and showing us how these overlap. A recent publication from researchers at The Chinese University of Hong Kong […]
Patience is Key to RNA Pol II Relationship with NucleosomeJuly 30, 2009here’s been lots of buzz about nucleosomes and RNAs lately. In fact, just last week EpiGenie reported that transcription initiation RNAs (tiRNAs) might be formed as RNA Pol II hits a nucleosome and backtracks. Nucleosomal post-transcriptional mods can cause RNA Polymerase II to pause or abort, while others can kick transcription into high gear. But […]
One Small SNP for miRNA, One Major Impact on Gene RegulationJuly 29, 2009Not that we’re trying to downplay the magnitude of getting peeps on the moon, but when you consider the amount of gene regulation that can be packed into a confined miRNA-target interaction one small step for man seems kinda 40yr old hat. It’s no wonder that single base changes in miRNAs and/or their targets can […]
tiRNAs Emerge from FANTOM4July 22, 2009As deep sequencing platforms displace Nintendo’s Wii as the most popular toy in the research community, labs are discovering new varieties of RNAs at a dizzying pace. The latest edition, transcription initiation RNAs (tiRNAs), were recently identified by scientists at the University of Queensland in Australia, and published in Nature Genetics last April, by mining […]
CLIPped Mouse Testes Reveal Novel Class of Small RNAsJuly 16, 2009Fish with germ cell-specific bait, and you get a new class of RNA. U Penn researchers CLIPped (Cross-Linked and ImmunoPrecipitated) mouse testis extract with the anti-DNA/RNA-binding protein MSY2, and caught a whole bunch of novel ~30 nt RNAs. While about 7% of these were known piRNAs, most came from a distinct class of testicular RNAs […]
NIH Digs into the Diet Movement with New Epigenetics Research GrantsJuly 16, 2009Nowadays it seems like everybody’s on some kind of a diet. Until recently, even public funding for epigenetic research had been leaner than a movie star on the South Beach diet. But with last year’s funding of the Roadmap Initiative and yesterday’s release of grant applications for the study of diet and epigenetics, things are […]
miBridge: Bringing mRNA UTRs TogetherJuly 9, 2009When it comes to the the miRNA translational repression model, 5’ UTRs have been neglected more than California’s budget deficit in recent years. Despite computational approaches predicting oodles of miRNA docking sites for miRNAs in the 5’ UTR, we haven’t seen that many studies tackle the other side of miRNA repression. But just a few […]
Want Smooth Muscle? You’ll Need Some miR-145July 8, 2009OK, maybe you won’t find a bottle of miR-145 at the juice bar of your local gym anytime soon, but a paper published recently in Nature says that miR-145 is all you really need to turn mouse cardiac progenitor cells into smooth muscle. What’s more, both miR-145 and miR-143 team up to regulate a smooth […]
HIV’s RISC-y BehaviorJuly 1, 2009There’s nothing restricting miRNAs to targeting just endogenous mRNAs. So it’s no surprise to find that expression of miR-29a – which targets the 3’UTR of HIV-1 mRNA — increases during HIV infection. Researchers from U Mass Med School in Worchester, and the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, found that HIV mRNA hangs […]
