Environmental Epigenetics

With over 350 journals, Oxford University Press is one of the largest publishers of scientific journals. In considering their portfolio recently, they realized they had no specific journals in the rapidly growing area of epigenetics. When they approached me about helping to establish a journal in this area, I considered what other journals had been developed. Several fine journals have been developed in the areas around molecular epigenetics (e.g. Epigenetics, Epigenetics and Chromatin, and Epigenomics) and disease epigenetics (e.g. Clinical Epigenetics and Medical Epigenetics), with 10 in total journals currently focused on epigenetic topics. One of the main areas of epigenetics not currently addressed is environmental epigenetics. Therefore, I agreed to assist Oxford University Press to establish a journal in this area to be called Environmental Epigenetics and act as its founding editor-in-chief. The field of epigenetics started in the 1940s with Conrad Waddington, who coined the term, studying environment–gene interactions and non-Mendelian genetic phenomena. Epigenetic molecular markers were first identified in the 1970s with DNA methylation, but it was not until the late 1980s and 1990s when many of the epigenetic processes (DNA methylation, histone modifications, chromatin structure, and noncoding RNA) were identified. To put this in perspective, a search of PubMed using the term “epigenetics” yields 12 000 publications, 11 400 (95%) of which were published in the past 5 years. This reflects the dramatic recent growth in the field. Within the area of epigenetics, the largest sub-topic is molecular epigenetics at 40%, then disease epigenetics at over 30% followed by environmental epigenetics at nearly 25% of the literature published. Growth in the area of environmental epigenetics is shown in Fig. 1, based on PubMed information. Epigenetics provides the molecular conduit between the environment and regulation of genome activity. The majority of environmental factors cannot alter DNA sequence, but most