On any good pirate map, ‘X’ marks the spot for buried treasure. It turns out the same is true in epigenetics: xQTL analysis marks the spot for buried GWAS associations. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have been instrumental in identifying single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with human disease. However, finding the biological relevance of such SNPs […]
- Epigenome
DNA Methylation Takes a World Tour of Human Diversity
Once a rock star makes it big, they treat the world to a tour. However, DNA methylation, being both an epigenetic rock star and an unbearable diva, has been more than fashionably late to the party! But fear not! DNA methylation has made a comeback with a hit record of scientific insight into human diversity. […]
dCas9 Epigenome Editing Toolbox Smashes Histone Methylation Dogma
Tools are great for building, but sometimes it’s more fun using them to break things down. While we’ve applied deactivated Cas9 (dCas9) tools to build our knowledge of DNA methylation, this time it takes an entire toolbox to break the connection between histone methylation and gene repression. This constructive deconstruction comes at you from the […]
HDACking Histone Acetylation With dCas9-HDAC3
Hacking the epigenome is no easy task. Each deactivated Cas9 (dCas9) system boasts its own nuances that must be teased apart before we can crack the histone code with its suite of effector domains. When it comes to histone acetylation, we’ve seen the histone acetyltransferase construct dCas9-p300, which writes H3K27ac to activate gene expression. However, […]
Tea Beats Coffee as a DNA Methylation Caffeine Fix in Women
There’s no denying that caffeine fuels epigenetic discovery, but now a recent epigenome-wide association study (EWAS) offers up a different epigenetic perspective about your daily caffeine fix. This creative rush comes at you from a European collaboration led by Uppsala University (Sweden). The team brewed up the first epigenome-wide association study (EWAS) of coffee and […]