The Transposable Elements Methods and Protocols Book is out

Together with our friend and collaborator from the QMUL Epigenetics Hub, Miguel Branco, we have edited a special number of the Methods in Molecular Biology Springer series. We aimed to cover both the bioinformatic and the molecular biology approaches to work with Transposable Elements. We tried to keep it broad and useful for anyone working on an eukaryotic system. Feel free to get in touch if you would like more information about any given chapter.

Link to the book: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-0716-2883-6

If you want to comment or congratulate us, feel free to drop a like or a message in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/BrancoLab/status/1598331922102493184

A Long Journey into Epigenome engineering comes to an end

Not all projects need to be about evolution! This would be the first project in which no phylogenetic trees were used at any stage, as it focuses on human cell lines and epigenome engineering approaches. We generated an artificial zinc finger fused to DNMT3A to methylate thousands of promoters in the human genome. This revealed some surprising transcriptional responses, showing that not all genes got silenced, and we used several epigenomic profiling techniques to understand the potential differences across these promoters. Also, we found that methylation did not last long in either promoters or enhancers, driven by Transcription Factor binding. This project took some years to finish, yet was a nice collaboration with the Lister Lab.

To read more, have a look at the paper here: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-022-02728-5.

For a "tweetorial" about the main findings, check this: https://twitter.com/deMendoza_Alex/status/1551917337128886272?s=20&t=ZeyNylC5jlNMIN008u_Bmg

The birth of a novel epigenomic regulatory layer

This week we have published a story about non-CpG methylation evolution in the brain in vertebrates and beyond. A link to the open access to the manuscript can be found here:

https://rdcu.be/cdMk8

And also a blogpost comment on how this project started and developed thanks to a great network of collaborators:

https://natureecoevocommunity.nature.com/posts/a-brain-zoo-reveals-how-a-non-canonical-form-of-dna-methylation-emerged