Post tagged: Enhancers

Enhancer Journal Club: Enhancers and super-enhancers have an equivalent regulatory role in embryonic stem cells through regulation of single or multiple genes

I've been thinking a lot about super-enhancers recently and I found this paper1 from Jennifer Mitchell's lab very interesting, especially as whether and how super-enhancers are distinct from "normal" enhancers has been generating a lot of discussion in the enhancer/gene-regulation literature recently2,3

Here's the abstract:

Transcriptional …

Enhancer Journal Club: Functional annotation of native enhancers with a Cas9-histone demethylase fusion

I really enjoyed Eric Mendenhall's 2013 paper in Nature Biotechnology1, where he was able to target LSD1 histone demethylase activity to endogenous enhancers using TALE fusion proteins (read my thoughts on that paper here). So I was very interested to see a similar approach published earlier this year in …

Enhancer Journal Club: Enhancer hijacking activates GFI1 family oncogenes in medulloblastoma

I read a neat little paper in Nature just before Christmas about enhancer hijacking, which I think is a particularly interesting topic. The original paper can be found at: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v511/n7510/full/nature13379.html

The abstract is as follows:

Medulloblastoma is a highly malignant …

Enhancer Journal Club: Genome-wide identification and characterization of functional neuronal activity–dependent enhancers

I noticed a nice paper this week in Nature Neuroscience from Michael Greenberg's lab at Harvard Medical School. The paper discusses the identification of enhancers in neurons which are activated (or deactivated) when those neurons are stimulated by membrane de-polarization. The original paper can be found at: http://www.nature …

Enhancer Journal Club: Polycomb potentiates meis2 activation in midbrain by mediating interaction of the promoter...

Much of the tissue specific gene-expression required for development appears to be driven by cis-regulatory elements like enhancers, but I think the field has a long way to go in understanding how these elements work mechanistically. One nice paper on this subject has recently been published by Haruhiko Koseki's lab …