{"id":242891,"date":"2026-08-19T05:22:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:22:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/largest-catalog-yet-of-how-human-cells-read-dna-shows-how-chemical-marks-alter-genetic-instructions"},"modified":"2026-08-19T05:22:26","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T10:22:26","slug":"largest-catalog-yet-of-how-human-cells-read-dna-shows-how-chemical-marks-alter-genetic-instructions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/largest-catalog-yet-of-how-human-cells-read-dna-shows-how-chemical-marks-alter-genetic-instructions","title":{"rendered":"Largest catalog yet of how human cells read DNA shows how chemical marks alter genetic instructions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/largest-catalog-yet-of-how-human-cells-read-dna-shows-how-chemical-marks-alter-genetic-instructions.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Every cell in the body contains essentially the same DNA, yet a brain cell behaves differently from a muscle cell or an immune cell. The difference lies largely in how each cell reads its genetic instructions.<\/p>\n<p>Proteins called transcription factors bind specific DNA sequences and help control when and where genes are active. They direct processes ranging from <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2023-07-tango-reveals-transcription-factors-dna.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">embryonic development<\/a> to immune function. When this regulation goes wrong, disease can result. But although the human genome contains around 1,600 transcription factors, the DNA-binding preferences of many have remained unknown.<\/p>\n<p>An international collaboration led by Timothy Hughes at the University of Toronto has now filled many of these gaps in a study <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41586-026-10798-9\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Nature<\/i>. The researchers combined five experimental platforms with computational analyses, performing more than 4,800 experiments and identifying DNA-binding motifs for 177 transcription factors that were previously poorly characterized. The work added around 130 distinct motifs to the known vocabulary of human gene regulation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every cell in the body contains essentially the same DNA, yet a brain cell behaves differently from a muscle cell or an immune cell. The difference lies largely in how each cell reads its genetic instructions. Proteins called transcription factors bind specific DNA sequences and help control when and where genes are active. They direct [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19,1523,412,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry","category-computing","category-genetics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242891\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}