This month’s issue of CSH Protocols features an article by Andrew Salinger and Monica Justice, detailing a technique for Mouse Mutagenesis Using N-Ethyl-N-Nitrosourea (ENU) (article is freely available as one of our featured protocols). Back in the ancient days of my graduate school work, the idea of doing large scale forward genetics in mouse was unthinkable. Who had the space, let alone the funding and personnel to keep and track all of those cages? It was always one of those reasons we grumbled about the Drosophila labs, and the incredibly cool tools they had at their disposal. Over the years, the techniques were refined, and now, according to Justice, screens like this are an “established as part of a mouse geneticist’s toolkit,” and can be effective even in labs with very limited amounts of mouse space. So it’s nice to see this incredibly productive method readily available for use in mouse. Now if we can just do something about that pesky internal development that’s so limiting to imaging experiments…..

The March issue of CSH Protocols has two featured (freely available) protocols on high-throughput methods for studying gene regulation.

The first method approaches regulatory analysis through epigenetic mechanisms. Methylated CpG Island Amplification and Microarray (MCAM) for High-Throughput Analysis of DNA Methylation, developed by Marcos Estecio and Jean-Pierre Issa of the MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Pearlly Yan and Tim Huang of the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center is a rapid, genome-wide method for identifying regions where methylation is occurring. This protocol has proven successful for proven successful for use in comparing normal tissues and tumors, helping researchers better understand the factors responsible for cancer.

The second protocol looks at the binding of regulatory proteins to DNA and their role in transcriptional regulation. The method, DNA Immunoprecipitation (DIP) for the Determination of DNA-binding Specificity, allows researchers to determine the specific DNA sequence that a regulatory protein binds. The technique allows for rapid screening of the entire genome for these binding sites, which gives insight into which genes these protein factors control.