INTRODUCTION Acute exposure to environmental factors such as stress, diet and toxicants can produce long-lasting biological effects on the affected individuals and even their offspring, which has tremendous clinical and evolutionary implications (Jirtle and Skinner, 2007; Rando and Verstrepen, 2007; Jablonka and Raz, 2009; Faulk and Dolinoy, 2011; Skinner, 2011; Daxinger and Whitelaw, 2012). So...

Given that treatment options for patients with glioblastoma are limited, much effort has been made to clarify the underlying mechanisms of gliomagenesis. Recent genome-wide genomic and epigenomic analyses have revealed that mutations in epigenetic modifiers occur frequently in gliomas and that dysregulation of epigenetic mechanisms is closely associated with glioma formation. Given that epigene...

Epigenetic mechanisms mediate genomic adaption to the environment and epigenetic alterations can contribute to the development of disease phenotypes, as can genetic variants. A variety of molecular mechanisms are involved in epigenetic regulation, including post-transcriptional histone modifications, histone variants, ATP-dependent chromatin remodelling complexes, polycomb/trithorax protein com...

Epigenetic factors determine responses to internal and external stimuli in eukaryotic organisms. Whether and how environmental conditions feed back to the epigenetic landscape is more a matter of suggestion than of substantiation. Plants are suitable organisms with which to address this question due to their sessile lifestyle and diversification of epigenetic regulators. We show that several re...

Posttranslational modifications to histones affect chromatin structure and function resulting in altered gene expression and changes in cell behavior. Aberrant gene expression and altered epigenomic patterns are major features of cancer. Epigenetic changes including histone acetylation, histone methylation, and DNA methylation are now thought to play important roles in the onset and progression...

T epigenetic marks displayed by a cancer cell originate from two separate processes: The most prominent epigenetic signatures are associated with the cell of origin, i.e., the lineage and cell type identity imposed during development. The second set comprises those aberrant cancer-specific epigenetic marks that appear during tumor initiation or subsequent malignant progression. These are genera...

Along with many of the genome-wide transitions in chromatin composition throughout spermatogenesis, epigenetic modifications on histone tails and DNA are continuously modified to ensure stage specific gene expression in the maturing spermatid. Recent findings have suggested that the repertoire of epigenetic modifications in the mature sperm may have a potential role in the developing embryo and...

The reverse engineering of gene regulatory network (GRN) is an important problem in systems biology. While gene expression data provide a main source of insights, other types of data are needed to elucidate the structure and dynamics of gene regulation. Epigenetic data (e.g., histone modification) show promise to provide more insights into gene regulation and on epigenetic implication in biolog...

Epigenetic modifications affect gene expression and thereby govern a wide range of biological processes such as differentiation, development and tumorigenesis. Recent initiatives to define genome-wide DNA methylation and histone modification profiles by microarray and sequencing methods have led to the construction of databases. These databases are repositories for international epigenetic cons...