Temporally discordant chromatin accessibility and DNA demethylation define short and long-term enhancer regulation during cell fate specification
Research at Assistant Professor Emily Hodges’ lab at Vanderbilt University strives to understand how epigenetic features shape human genomes. Their work aims to dissect the relationship between DNA methylation and gene regulation, particularly with respect to the gene regulatory activity of non-coding functional elements.
In this preprint, researchers used differentiating neural stem cells as a model system to understand the relationship between DNA methylation and genome dynamics. Learn how the research team reveals 5-hydroxymethylation (5hmC) increases during chromatin opening at four days, signaling active demethylation. Further, 5-methylcytosine (5mC) data better explains static, closed chromatin states while 5hmC data better explains dynamic chromatin states and combined 6-base data explains both static and dynamic states.
