The Chromatin Digest

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  • 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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    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…

  • 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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    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,…

  • Microscopic DNA scaffolds may help us combat tuberculosis

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    Isabella
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    A scanning electron micrograph of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, an infectious bacterial disease that impacts lung function. Image from NIAID on Wikimedia Commons, under CC BY 2.0. Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the causal agent of tuberculosis (TB), which is transmitted through air droplets from person to person and causes severe lung defects. Many…

  • Folding under pressure: RNA looping as a novel epigenetic inheritance mechanism?

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    Isabella
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    An example of the different possible types of RNA secondary structures. Credit to Oregon State University, sourced from flickr.com under CC BY-SA 2.0. Most research into epigenetic inheritance – the transmission of traits from cell to cell without altering the DNA sequence – has focused on DNA and histone modifications. New evidence suggests, however, that RNAs,…