Work

The New Field Of Epigenomics: Implications for Cancer and Other Common Disease Research

Year: 2004

Type: preprint

Abstract: Epigenetic alterations involve information heritableduring cell division other than the DNA sequence itself.Epigenetic marks were originally thought to involve onlyunusual phenomena such as position effect variegation inflies (Tartof and Bremer 1990), telomere silencing(Brachmann et al. 1995), mating-type silencing in yeast(Haber 1998), and transgene-induced gene silencing inplants and animals (Dorer and Henikoff 1994). However,it is increasingly clear that epigenetic inheritance plays acentral role in defining cellular growth and differentiation. With exceptions such as antibody gene rearrangements and changes in mitochondrial DNA, there is littleevidence to support a role for changes in DNA sequencein development, and thus epigenetics is likely to be at theheart of maintaining the differences between stem cellsand somatic cells, one cell type and another, and agedversus younger cells...

Source: Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology

DOI: 10.1101/sqb.2004.69.447

Authors: H.T. BJORNSSON, H. CUI, D. GIUS, M.D. FALLIN, A.P. FEINBERG

Institutions: National Institutes of Health, Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins Medicine, National Cancer Institute, Center for Cancer Research

Language: English

Topic: Epigenetics and DNA Methylation

Subfield: Molecular Biology

Field: Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: National Institutes of Health, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Cancer Institute, National Institute of General Medical Sciences