Tag: article
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Old proteins, new tricks
In order to switch genes on and off, chromatin has to be opened and shut, enabling the DNA to become open to the whim of the rest of the nucleus for transcription. This is called chromatin remodelling, and it’s far from an easy task because our DNA is wrapped around huge protein complexes called nucleosomes.…
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Decoding the molecular wiring underlying early development
Schematic of a poised enhancer, its associated modifications, and how it contacts its target gene. Designed in Biorender by me, 2023 (Figure 1B, BSc thesis) In the earliest stages of human development, it’s vital that genes are expressed at very specific times and places. If this goes wrong, developmental defects can arise. Enhancer regions, particularly…
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Stressed cells offload damaged DNA to their neighbours
During cellular stress, cells bundle broken DNA into micronuclei, which are then shuttled through microscopic tubes like a train travelling through a tunnel. Picture from here, under CC BY 2.0. DNA is precious; without it, our cells would not be able to survive. As such, it’s kept safely within the confines of the nucleus. The…
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Meaning only emerges when you look at the wider picture: what a drug safety meeting taught me about epigenetics
Guest Blog Series 2026 By Hemlata Pant A group of people in a meeting room. Picture by Christina Morello. Image is in the public domain. I first came across epigenetics at A level. Back then, it felt reassuringly neat. I learned that adding chemical tags to DNA or histones could tighten or loosen chromatin, and…
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Chromatin couples are needed to form loops
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…
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A tale of two sequences
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…
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The vault: 40-year-old cellular mystery one step closer to being solved
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…
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International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2026: inspirational women in epigenetics
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…
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DNA repair leaves unexpected scars
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…
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Should we rethink the histone code?
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.…