Silencing of Ultraconserved ncRNAs Is Not So Golden in CancerAugust 31, 2010If you live near a construction site, are listening to one half of a cell-phone conversation in a movie theater, or stuck on an airliner next to a fussy infant, then for you silence may indeed be golden. But, for certain ultraconserved non-coding RNAs, transcriptional silencing can lead to a cellular uproar. A new article […]
DNA Methylation States Mix and Mingle on the Nuclear Dance FloorAugust 31, 2010Remember those lame junior high dances, where most of us stood silently and uncomfortably against the gym wall, watching our wilder classmates rock out to Bon Jovi on the dance floor? Some researchers think that methylated and unmethylated promoters in tumors segregate themselves in the same way: silenced genes gather in heterochromatin at the nuclear […]
The Epigenetics of Mental IllnessAugust 31, 2010Mental disorders like depression will likely affect 1/6 of Americans at some point in their life. That probability might be higher if you’re a Cleveland sports fan, but seriously, with mental illnesses affecting hundreds of millions of people globally each year, we’re glad to see an increasing focus on the epigenetics of these disorders. In […]
Mecp2, miR-212 Keep Cocaine Addiction In CheckAugust 18, 2010Anyone who’s ever seen an episode of Celebrity Rehab knows that addiction is a very complicated issue, and as scientists recently found out, even the molecular basis of addiction is no simple matter. A group led by Paul Kenny at Scripps Florida studied cocaine use in rats that were allowed to dose themselves with the […]
5-Hydroxymethylcytosine Gets SensitiveAugust 17, 2010One of the great things about science is that whenever a new problem presents itself, there are always some members of the community who set out to find innovative solutions. In this case, it’s been a bear to detect and quantify 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5-hmC) but some cagey researchers at the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich, […]
