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COVER STORY
Exotic Nucleic Acid Bases
Scientists first thought the human genome was composed of just four DNA bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. But on closer inspection, they discovered that cytosine is sometimes methylated, a decoration that silences genes and thus impacts biochemical processes such as day-to-day gene expression. This year saw the announcement of additional cytosine modifications, in the form of 5-formylcytosine and 5-carboxylcytosine, as well as a flurry of research on 5-hydroxymethylcytosine, which was discovered in human brain cells and stem cells in 2009. Standing out among these developments was work led by Guo-Liang Xu of the State Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chuan He of the University of Chicago. Their team discovered how 5-carboxylcytosine and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine are involved in one of the great mysteries in biology, a process called active demethylation (C&EN Online Latest News, Aug. 15;
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