In this issue of Epigenetics

Role of Epigenetics in Biology and Human Diseases

For a long time, scientists have tried to describe disorders just by genetic or environmental factors. However, the role of epigenetics in human diseases has been considered from a half of century ago. In the last decade, this subject has attracted many interests, especially in complicated disorders such as behavior plasticity, memory, cancer, autoimmune disease, and addiction as well as neurod...

The Role of Epigenetics in Cancer Drug Resistance

Cancer is caused by aberrant genetic and epigenetic changes in genes expression. DNA methylation, histone modification, and microRNAs gene deregulation are the most known epigenetic changes in different stages of cancer. Since every tumor has its own specific epigenome, any abnormal pattern is a potential biomarker for classification of different types of tumors. Despite, tumorigenesis, abnorma...

Epigenetics in diagnosis of colorectal cancer

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a third most common epithelial carcinoma. CRC is known to develop from the early precancerous lesion to full blown malignancy via definite phases due to cumulative mutations and aberrant methylation of number of genes. The use of serum biomarkers that is non-invasive to discriminate cancer patients from healthy persons will prove to be an important tool to improve the...

The Prospects of Epigenetics in Neuroscience

Nuclear Architecture and Epigenetics of Lineage Choice

Differentiation is an epigenetic process which is installed by changes of transcriptional programs over successive cellular divisions. A number of studies have reported the effects of biochemical modifications of chromatin (DNA and chromatin proteins) on the regulation of transcription. Although, these studies are able to explain how transcription of a given gene is regulated (toward activation...

Environment, epigenetics and reproduction

A conference summary of the third biannual Kenya Africa Conference "Environment, Epigenetics and Reproduction" is provided. A partial special Environmental Epigenetics issue containing a number of papers in Volume 3, Issue 3 and 4 are discussed.