August 2013 HSCI Community Newsletter
The Harvard Stem Cell Matrix
Upcoming Events
Cardiovascular Program Interlab
September 4, 12:30PM-2:00PM

CyTOF Users Group Meeting
September 17, 11:00AM-12:30PM

Diabetes Think Tank
October 16, 9:00AM-5:00PM
Announcements
Jobs
Media Mentions

8/4/13
The El Paso Times profiles 2013 HSCI Internship Program participant Rebecca Soto, who worked in the Daley lab. Program director William Lensch is quoted.

7/31/13
Annual HSCI-CIRM junior faculty meetings spark new model of leukemia development; Harvard Gazette story features the collaboration between Amy Wagers, PhD, of HSCI, and Emmanuelle Passegué, PhD, of UCSF.

7/24/13
Jay Bradner, MD, talks drug discovery, cancer, and targeting the epigenome with Stembook's Lisa Girard, PhD.
Predicting Breast Cancer Risk
Kornelia Polyak, MD, PhD, and the value of preventative research

 

An international scientific collaborative led by the Harvard Stem Cell Institute's Kornelia Polyak, MD, PhD, has discovered why women who give birth in their early twenties are less likely to eventually develop breast cancer than women who don't, triggering a search for a way to confer this protective state on all women. Continue reading

 

Read the paper in Cell Stem Cell.
Mapping the Epigenome
Alexander Meissner, PhD, and the dynamics of DNA methylation

Meissner's team, led by graduate student Michael Ziller, mapped nearly all of the 28-million CpG sites among the 3-billion nucleotides that make up human DNA, and then wanted to know which of these 28 million are dynamic or static across all cell types.

The researchers found that eighty percent of the 28-million CpG sites are largely unchanged and might not participate in the regulation of the cell types, while the dynamic ones sit at sites that are relevant for gene expression--in particular distal regulatory sites such as enhancers. "Importantly this allows us to improve our current approaches of mapping this important mark through more targeted strategies that still capture most of the dynamics," Meissner said. Read the full story.

Read the paper in Nature.
Member News
  • Alan Mullen, MD, PhD, joins HSCI as a Principal Faculty member and Peter Oettgen, MD, joins as an Affiliated Faculty member.  
  • Kevin Eggan, PhD, is a dad! His son was born early August 16.  
HSCI Research Updates