Oh Sugar! Gestational Fructose Exposure Linked to Long-Term Brain DNA Methylation ChangesFebruary 16, 2018Here at EpiGenie, we don’t like to sugar-coat our headlines. The sickly-sweet truth is that fructose can be pretty bad for your health. Fructose has become a common additive in many foods in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. Sugary drinks are one of the most common forms. Heavy soft drink consumption is linked to […]
Epigenetic Aging Analysis Suggests That TERT Isn´t the Anti-aging Target You Are Looking For!February 13, 2018This isn’t some sort of Jedi mind trick, we promise, but TERT may not be the anti-aging target you are looking for! TERT, or telomerase reverse transcriptase, plays an essential role in the elongation and maintenance of telomeres and as telomeres shorten with age, many surmise that activation of TERT represents an exciting approach to […]
Epigenetic Editing Misses the Mark: dCas9-DNMT3A Causes Off-Target Genome-Wide DNA HypermethylationFebruary 12, 2018While we’ve been captivated by the powerful applications of precision epigenetic editing via deactivated Cas9 (dCas9), we’ve also been mesmerized by the fact that epigenetic editing doesn’t always work as expected. Building on our need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, new findings from the lab of Alexander Meissner at […]
SunTag Casts Light on iPSC ReprogrammingFebruary 6, 2018While the DNA editing function of CRISPR/Cas9 systems may appear to hog the limelight, we believe that a new SunTag approach for CRISPR/Cas9-mediated induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) reprogramming via epigenome editing deserves its day in the sun! The exciting reprogramming strategy utilizes an endonuclease dead Cas9 (dCas9) fused to a repetitive protein scaffold known […]
Like a Fine Wine, Histone Variant H2A.Z Represses Memories and Accumulates with Age!February 6, 2018While aging works wonders for the taste of our ever-accumulating wine collection, the passage of the years is not as kind to our memories! To fully decipher the processes underlying learning and memory differences in the aging brain, the lab of Iva Zovkic at the University of Toronto Mississauga (Canada) recently expanded on past work […]
