Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Histone Code Cracked?

This report in Nature presents genome-wide CHIP maps of a variety of histone modifications in a few types of embryonic and stem cell lineages. Seems like they found some very interesting signatures that correlated well with gene expression status. For example, trimethylation at lysines 4 and 27 could discriminate expressed versus inducible versus repressed genes, whereas the same modification at lysines 4 and 9 marks imprinted regions. Very cool. Of course we'll have to see what the AC has to say for the expert opinion.

I once proposed a similar project in a mock post-doc grant proposal for a systems biology grad class I took (except with the added minor step of cloning mice by somatic cell nuclear transfer). It got pretty bad reviews. Apparently some people thought it was too ambitious. Go figure. This one only took 15 authors...


2 comments:

Anonymous Coward said...

Cool paper. I'm definately going to have to read it. I think the novelty is mostly in the technique rather than the findings. Being able to detect modifications in a single mollecule, in an allele-specific ways is going to open up all kinds of cool high-throughput screens. However the lysine 36 trimethylation non coding transcripts is a cool finding.

Regarding your grant, it's well known people like to pick the grants that are easy to understand so that they feel they "get it". You want to make them feel like they are smart. Creativity and risk taking unfortunately are more often than not punished. I find myself in the same situation right now, for my comps, i want to write an ambitious grant about a really poorly understood phenomena. mostly because i want to learn about it, and since it's not a real grant why not think big? But I'm afraid it's going to backfire...

Bayman said...

Yeah that was my thinking, might as well have some fun and push yourself to learn with the pretend grants and save the excruciating simplicity for when it's absolutely necessary (if ever...). Of course ideally I'd still like to believe that creative grants can still be made simple and easy to understand if sufficiently well-written...