The Chromatin Digest

Author: Isabella

  • Chromatin couples are needed to form loops

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    Isabella
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    Guest Blog Series 2026 By Andres Hernandez Maduro Chromosomal DNA strands are long. In each of your body cells, there is approximately two metres worth of DNA packed tightly in a chamber (the nucleus) around five micrometres in diameter. They are also quite sticky, and if thrown into a random soup of molecules will tend…

  • A tale of two sequences

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    Lego bricks join up easily, with each part having a distinct function. Photo by Arto Alanenpää on Wikimedia Commons, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Biology never makes things easy for us. It’s tempting to think of the genome as a well-oiled machine, with separate regions that join neatly together like Lego bricks to perform an overall…

  • Call for Submissions: Guest Blog Series 2026!

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    Isabella
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    The Chromatin Digest is open to submissions for a Guest Blog Series! 🙂 UPDATE 18/04/26: Submissions will be accepted beyond Friday 24th April 2026, and will be uploaded on a rolling basis. Thank you! If you’re interested in scientific writing, have some fascinating research to share, or a story you wish to tell, I would…

  • The vault: 40-year-old cellular mystery one step closer to being solved

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    A vault particle. Image adapted from Tanaka et al. on Wikimedia Commons under CC BY SA-3.0. In 1986, researcher Nancy Kedersha and her supervisor Leonard Rome sat in the basement of the UCLA Biological Chemistry Department, next to an intimidating electron microscope that towered over the rest of the room. After several days of meticulously…

  • International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2026: inspirational women in epigenetics

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    Isabella
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    Today (Wednesday 11th February) marks the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Here are just a few of many trailblazing women in epigenetics that I find inspiring: Barbara McClintock Barbara McClintock was an American biologist, and one of the first scientists to postulate that genes had to be switched on and off, even…

  • DNA repair leaves unexpected scars

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    Artistic rendition of enzymes repairing a DNA break. Image from Flickr.com, courtesy of Tom Ellenberger, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and Dave Gohara, Saint Louis University School of Medicine, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0. Hi again! I hope everyone had a great Christmas period and New Year. After a few weeks off…

  • Epigenetics Wrapped 2025

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    Since it’s coming up to the end of the year, and since Spotify Wrapped came out the other week (despite it saying my listening age was 76!), I thought I’d do my own roundup of 10 exciting and impactful findings in epigenetics and -genomics published in 2025. Here goes! 1. A detailed, single-cell methylation map…

  • Should we rethink the histone code?

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    Histone modifications and their conventional notation. From Fig. 1 of Turner, 2005. “Dream of complications / On and on / That’s how my observation tends” – Interpol, “Complications” off their 2018 album, Marauder I was reading a paper earlier and the tiniest thing jumped out at me: the histone modification H3K27me3 written inversely as me3K27H3.…

  • The epigenetics of winter

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    Snow in Finland, 2022. Picture is my own. If you’re in the UK, you’ve probably noticed the turn in the weather we’ve had recently. Half the trees have shed their autumn leaves, forming dark red blankets across the wet pavements, and if you leave the house without a thick coat, you’ll be confronted by the…

  • Switching memories on and off

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    The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí. Sourced from brushandbubbles.com under CC BY-NC 4.0. “Oh Science and Progress! / You great big wonderful world! Oh what have you done?” – Sir John Betjeman, 1940 Ever find yourself randomly thinking about an embarrassing memory, something you said or did years ago, and wishing you could forget…