Category Archives: Methyltransferases

Reading the Effect of Tea Leaves…and Beating Genetic Fatalism in Breast Cancer

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Nicole Kelesoglu

The recent news about Angelina Jolie getting a prophylactic double mastectomy is both sad and encouraging. Women, and their physicians, are becoming more aware of individual breast cancer risk. They are willing to use any available treatments to reduce that risk, and promote health. Tamoxifen is a breast cancer drug success story. It works by competing with estradiol for estrogen receptor protein. Thereby inhibiting the Erα (estrogen receptor). See http://www.drugs.com/pro/tamoxifen.html Tamoxifen 1st significantly improves survival.  2nd reduces recurrence.  3rd reduces the incidence of breast cancer in high risk women. The drawback is that the tumors need to be overexpressing estrogen receptor, or ER+. Cancer that is “estrogen receptor negative”, or ER- now has a comparably worse prognosis. This is because … Continue reading →

Posted in Acetylation, Breast cancer, Cell Culture Models, DNA Methylation, Histone Modifications, Hydroxymethylation, Methyltransferases, Oncology, Sodium Bisulfite Sequencing, chIP | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bee-lieve it! Epigenetics Differentiates the Hive : Guest Post by NEB Scientist Rick Feehery

Posted on November 11, 2011 by New England Biolabs

Keeping honeybees runs in our family. My wife’s father keeps many hives, his father kept hives, his father and so on. Our one hive this year produced over 30 pound of honey. Fresh honey is a real treat as the flavor stems from the local fauna: purple loosestrife and apple blossoms. Very different from what you get from the local food mart. Aside from the obvious agricultural benefit that honeybee provides, pollination of plants in the food chain, they are really fascinating insects to observe. Every other year on average in the spring time when the weather is warm and the sky is clear, we can hear a district loud buzzing sound from the hive. A mass exodus of bees … Continue reading →

Posted in Animal Models, DNA Methylation, Methyltransferases, Nutrigenomics | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Histones Signal Other Proteins Too

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Chris Womack

Here’s an epigenetics first. It turns out that intermolecular signaling in epigenetics — all that ubiquination, methylation, and so forth — doesn’t always end at DNA or histones, where those two components go on just to regulate genes (or to encourage more modification of themselves and each other). Nope, John Latham and colleagues at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center reported in Cell last week that there’s at least one case — in yeast — in which a modified histone allows a non-histone protein to methylate another non-histone protein. That is, the signal travels from the Paf1 complex, to histone H2BK123 by ubiquination, to the COMPASS complex — which needs that ubiquination to di-methylate Dam1. (It’s far more … Continue reading →

Posted in Applications, Chromatin Structure, DNA Methylation, Gene Regulation, Histone Modifications, Methylation, Methyltransferases, Phosphorylation, Ubiquitination | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Cytosine-Mod Mysteries Sort-of Solved? Disappearing Methyls and Regulatory 5-hmCs

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Chris Womack

Last week’s excitement about the discovery of “seventh” and “eighth” DNA bases might’ve obscured parts of that work that shed a little more light on a very murky corner of epigenetics’ cytosine modifications — “Where do the methyls go?” And related research also published last week gets a bit closer to answering, “What does 5-hydroxymethyl-C really do, anyway?” The first, a Science paper by Yi Zhang and his group at the University of North Carolina, does introduce two new cytosine modifications, 5-formylcytosine and 5-carboxylcytosine. But more interesting, I think, is that the group gets halfway through proving a plausible mechanism for cytosine demethylation, which no one’s demonstrated yet. And during the same week, researchers at UCLA and New England Biolabs … Continue reading →

Posted in Applications, DNA Methylation, Developmental Biology, Gene Regulation, Genomewide Methylation Profiling, Methyl-specific Antibodies, Methyltransferases, Methyltransferases | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment