Steve Burger, a Harvard BBS graduate student, will begin his rotation. Steve will be characterizing novel DNA methylations. Welcome Steve!

Hanine Hajj, a neonatologist at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital has joined our lab. Hanine will be studying imprinting diseases. Welcome Hanine!

In our paper we identified that C. elegans, an organism previously thought to be devoid of DNA methylation, has methylation on the N6 position of adenines. We identified a 6mA demethylase, NMAD-1, and a potential 6mA methylase, DAMT-1. We found that 6mA increases transgenerationally in a paradigm of epigenetic inheritance and that NMAD-1 and DAMT-1 regulate this epigenetic process. Together these findings raise the exciting possibility that 6mA could carry epigenetic information across generations.

This methylation was previously thought to be restricted to prokaryotes and ancient eukaryotes. The identification of 6mA provides a new layer of epigenetic regulation in Metazoa. In the same issue of Cell papers from the groups of Hailin Wang and Dahua Chen identified 6mA in D. melanogaster and Chuan He’s group studied 6mA’s role in the algae C. reinhardtii. Our paper was also selected as the cover article.

Check out our paper: Greer EL*^$, Blanco MA*, Gu L, Sendinc E, Liu J, Aristizábal-Corrales D, Hsu C-H, Aravind L., He C, and Shi Y^$ DNA methylation on N⁶-adenine in C. elegans Cell (Cover Article) 161(4):868-78 * co-first author ^$ co-corresponding authors