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« Previous Entries Next Entries »USC Expands Epigenetics Research Space with New Tower
Sunday, May 27th, 2007The University of Southern California in Los Angeles has just opened a new 10-story, 172,440 square foot facility dedicated exclusively to the study of epigenetics, the Harlyne J. Norris Cancer Research Tower. The tower will host five floors of basic research, two floors of preventative medicine research, the Hinderstein Family Meditation Garden, a 200-seat auditorium, [...]
Mendel’s Garden #14
Tuesday, May 8th, 2007Welcome to the fourteenth edition of Mendel’s Garden, a blog carnival devoted to everything that has to do with the discipline of genetics. It’s ironic that it’s being hosted on a blog devoted entirely to showing that classical genetics isn’t what it’s all about — epigenetics is, in some ways, challenging the classical assumptions of [...]
Epigenomics & Sequencing Meeting 2007: July 9-10 in Boston, MA
Thursday, April 19th, 2007GeneExpression Systems, Inc. will be hosting the 1st International Epigenomics & Sequencing Meeting on July 9-10, 2007 at The Conference Center at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. I spoke with GeneExpression Systems Founder and CEO Dr. Krishnarao Appasani, who explained that the meeting is aimed at bringing together a diverse field of epigenomics researchers [...]
Agenda for March 2007 SACGHS Meeting Now Available
Friday, March 23rd, 2007The final agenda is now available online for the 12th meeting of the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health, and Society, which will be held Monday, March 26th and Tuesday, March 27th in Adelphi, MD. This is the committee that earlier this year completed its report on the viability of a large population cohort study [...]
DNA Methylation Involved in Memory Formation
Wednesday, March 14th, 2007Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have published new research supporting their hypothesis that DNA methylation plays a role in forming memories (1). The link between methylation and memory formation came about from the observation that methylation was disregulated in people suffering from brain disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.
In their experiments, the [...]
Liposuctioned Fat as a Source of Stem Cells
Friday, March 9th, 2007
In 2004, members of the American Society of Plastic Surgerons performed over 320,000 liposuction procedures (1). Who knew that the extracted fat was a potential source of stem cells for research or therapeutics.
Dr. Philipe Collas at the University os Oslo in Norway is conducting research to identify the stem cells among liposuctioned fat cells that [...]
Potential Conflict of Interest at NIEHS
Wednesday, March 7th, 2007The National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) is under fire. Effect Measure, a blog written anonymously by public health experts and practitioners, has written a critical review of David Schwartz’s two year term as director of the NIEHS:
Schwartz, like other Bush appointees, has a penchant for outsourcing public functions to private concerns, and under [...]
Epigenetics Symposium a Success at University of Arizona
Tuesday, March 6th, 2007The Arizona Daily Wildcat reports on the first major science symposium held last Saturday in the new Thomas W. Keating Bioresearch building at the University of Arizona in Tucson: Epigenetic Control of Gene Expression and Inheritance Symposium.
Maureen Peterson, a first-year genetics graduate student, said because of the symposium, she wants to do further research in [...]
New Mendel’s Garden Now Available
Monday, March 5th, 2007The latest edition of Mendel’s Garden, the blog carnival devoted to all things genetic, is now available at Behavioral Ecology Blog. Among the highlights this week are posts on the genetics of ABO blood types and eye color, the keys to managing DNA sequencing data, and details of the pitfalls in amassing large DNA databases. [...]
Gadd45a Promotes Epigenetic Gene Activation by Repair-Mediated DNA Demethylation
Monday, March 5th, 2007Nature has published a letter from researchers at the German Cancer Research Center involving their implication of the gene Gadd45a in one of the black boxes of epigenetic mechanisms: demethylation.
DNA methylation is an epigenetic modification that is essential for gene silencing and genome stability in many organisms. Although methyltransferases that promote DNA methylation are well [...]
Science Links for the Weekend
Saturday, March 3rd, 2007Here’s some of the best science links I’ve come across over the past couple weeks:
Volunteers at LibriVox have created a free audiobook of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Total running time: 24:22:37, total download size: 702.2 MB. (HT: Boing Boing).
Neurotopia hosts the 74th edition of Tangled Bank, [...]
Need Help in the Lab? Just Hit the Forums
Thursday, March 1st, 2007I recently got word that there is an active forum available for researchers in epigenetics; mainly DNA methylation and chromatin modification experiments. Protocol Online maintains a DNA Methylation, Histone and Chromatin Study forum that is fairly active. The majority of the posts seem to deal with bouncing ideas between technicians for troubleshooting problems in common [...]
New Sponsor: Ion Channel Media
Tuesday, February 20th, 2007The latest sponsor of Epigenetics News is Ion Channel Media, who has purchased a text link across every page of the site for US$40. Ion Channel Media has a network of 43 science portals that provide feeds of the latest published research in a wide range of scientific disciplines, including bioinformatics, apoptosis, cell cycle, transgenics, [...]
Cause For Concern in Microarray-Based Studies
Monday, January 22nd, 2007New research published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute shows that many microarray-based cancer studies have critical flaws in their analyses or conclusions.
In the study, Simon and his NCI colleague Dr. Alain Dupuy looked at 90 studies published through the end of 2004 that compared microarray profiling with medical results. The most frequently [...]
Monday Morning Carnivals and Links
Monday, January 22nd, 2007There are a number of recent science blog carnivals and other reading material that I’d like to highlight:
Tangled Bank #71
Mendel’s Garden
Carnival of Education #102
Four Stone Hearth #7
This past weekend marked the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, which was attended by nearly 200 researchers, bloggers, students, press, etc. Bora Zivkovic, one of the organizers of [...]
