Scottish Chromatin Group – Meeting and Webcast

This one is for the scientists, the Scottish Chromatin group are having a meeting next Wednesday (the 10th of February 2010).  The meeting is being held at the University of Edinburgh from 2pm-6pm, so obviously if you are in (0r near) Edinburgh you can just go along. Interestingly they are also webcasting the meeting, so if you can’t get to Edinburgh you can still hear the speakers.

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The talks are on:

• Epigenetic networks and cellular reprogramming
• Histone modifications required for a chromatin boundary
• X inactivation studies
• Regulation of transcription memory
• Building a mitotic chromosome: The complete protein parts list

Further details about the program and the webcast are here. They are charging £10 for the webcast to cover costs, which seem fair enough to me, it’s cheaper than the train to Edinburgh (!)

If you don’t know what chromatin is then you probably won’t get much out of the meeting, it’s likely to be very technical, but chromatin is something that is inside our bodies, it is made up of  DNA, RNA and proteins organised in a specific shape.  Just before your cells divide chromatin “condenses” and if you look down a microscope you can see things called chromosomes.  Chromosomes look like this:

How chromatin “works” is still a bit of a mystery, chromatin structure affects what genes are turned on and off in a cell and so this is an active area of cancer research.  Of course how chromatin works is probably important for a whole host of other diseases (not just cancer).

A lot of research into understanding chromatin is carried out in university labs and is considered “basic research”. Basic means the point of the research is to understand how a cell normally operates rather than “translational research” which is aimed at finding a treatment for a particular disease. Basic research does not mean that it is easy (!), far from it, it is frighteningly complicated. Both types of research are important if we are to cure cancer, we need to understand, in detail, how cells work if we are to continue to develop brand new ways of treating cancer.