The New Field Of Epigenomics: Implications for Cancer and Other Common Disease Research
- *Predoctoral Program in Human Genetics and Department of Medicine, and †Departments of Molecular Biology & Genetics, and Oncology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21205; ‡Radiation Oncology Branch, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
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...
