Chips spark surge in epigenetics

Since my colleague Brendan Maher returned from a chromatin meeting in January, it seems there's been a burst of activity in the epigenetics field, much of it covered here in __The Scientist__. On March 17, for instance, I linkurl:reported;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23235/ on the publication of three papers in __Genes & Development__, which mapped the binding of the Dosage Compensation Complex (DCC) across the __Drosophila__ X chromosome during fly development. Today, __linkurl:Nature Genetics;http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ng1792.html __and __linkurl:PloS Biology;http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040170 __ released papers that independently map Polycomb group (PcG) proteins across large swaths of the __Drosophila__ genome. Also today, our news site carries a linkurl:story;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23337/ on three papers (in __Cell__ and __Nature__) that map chromatin proteins across the genome in mammalian stem cells, suggesting that PcG complexes may help maintain totipotency in embryonic stem cells. Why the sudden flurry in genome-wide epigenetics research? Probably it's due to the recent availability of high-density tiling microarrays from the likes...