The Chromatin Digest

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  • 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! 🙂 If you’re interested in scientific writing, have some fascinating research to share, or a story you wish to tell, I would love to hear from you and feature you on the blog. This is open to everyone, regardless of career stage or…

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

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    Isabella
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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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    Isabella
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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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    Isabella
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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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    Isabella
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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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    Isabella
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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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    Isabella
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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…

  • My experience at the 2025 Epigenetics Society International Conference

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    Isabella
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    The Chromatin Digest has been on tour! I attended the 2025 Epigenetics Society International Conference in Chicago, USA last week. I had a brilliant time, and was fortunate enough to be invited to present a poster and short talk about my MSc by Research project (see About), which was definitely the highlight of my academic…

  • RNA previously dismissed as “noise” now shown to produce functional proteins

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    Isabella
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    Schematic of transcription regulation in mammalian cells. Enhancer RNAs (eRNAs) can be seen being transcribed from enhancers (yellow). Image from Bernstein0275 on Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA 4.0. I have a confession! A few months ago, I started a post with the sentence: “Enhancers are non-coding elements which are littered throughout the mammalian genome.” – me,…