The Chromatin Digest

Tag: molecular-cellular

  • 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…

  • 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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    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…

  • 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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    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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    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,…

  • Scanning the developing chromatome

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    The DNA-binding region of (human) SUV39H1, a key chromatin regulator identified by the authors with ChAC-DIA. Image from SINO Biological. Pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) exist in the embryo during early development and can develop into virtually any kind of cell in the body – pluripotent literally means “many-powered”. In the transition from early to late…

  • Lingering epigenetic signatures may underlie weight regain

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    The “yo-yo” effect: even after losing weight, it can be easily regained. Image from Enrique Calabuig on Flickr.com, under CC BY-SA 2.0. Individuals with obesity frequently regain lost weight over time, even following long-term intervention or surgery. However, due to the challenges of working with human fat tissue at a single-cell level, the cellular mechanisms…