Epigenetics

From DrugPedia: A Wikipedia for Drug discovery

[edit] EPIGENETICS

Epigenetics is the study of chemical changes in DNA that does not involve any genetic change. The most frequently studied epigenetic changes in DNA is DNA methylation. DNA methylation is known to effect the expression of several genes. It is known that aberrant methylation of DNA at the promoter regions of genes represses the expression of those genes by hindering the binding of transcription factors at the promoter site. Global DNA hypomethylation has been known to be involved in a number of disease states such as cancer. It has been proposed that global reduction in the methylation content of the genome somehow activates the latent retrotransposons that have been traditionally kept inactive by methylation. Aberrant methylation patterns have most frequently been seen in cancer and some other special metabolic states