The physics 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 Prospects of Epigenetics in Neuroscience

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...

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...

INVESTIGATION OF METHYLATION OF TNF-Α GENE PROMOTER IN PATIENTS WITH TYPE 2 DIABETES

Background: Type II diabetes is a chronic inflammatory condition that is associated with a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Tumor necrosis factor alpha or TNF-α as an adipocyte cytokine, which affects the signaling pathway of insulin, can contribute to insulin resistance in type 2 diabetes patients. Considering the importance of epigenetic changes in multifactorial diseases, th...