Promoting Illiteracy in Epigenetics: An Emerging Therapeutic Strategy

On the 10 th anniversary of the announcement of the draft sequence of the 3 billion DNA bases in the genome by the Human Genome Project, there is still a lack of molecular targeted therapies for previously intractable diseases. It has become clear that the genomes within and across species are too similar to explain the diversity of life and the etiology of all diseases, indicating that the underlying DNA sequence is only one component of this problem. Coinciding with the accomplishment of this impressive feat led by the NIH and Celera Genomics, has been the explosion of research defined as “epigenetic”. The term epigenetics was first coined in the 1940s by British embryologist and geneticist Conrad Waddington [1], who was attempting to describe “the interactions of genes with their environment, which brings the phenotype into being”. Since then, this definition has been refined to encompass the study of heritable phenotypic traits that result