Epigenetics and the control of multicellularity

Epigenetics Decouples Mutational from Environmental Robustness. Did It Also Facilitate Multicellularity?

The evolution of ever increasing complex life forms has required innovations at the molecular level in order to overcome existing barriers. For example, evolving processes for cell differentiation, such as epigenetic mechanisms, facilitated the transition to multicellularity. At the same time, studies using gene regulatory network models, and corroborated in single-celled model organisms, have ...

Role of Epigenetics in Biology and Human Diseases

For a long time, scientists have tried to describe disorders just by genetic or environmental factors. However, the role of epigenetics in human diseases has been considered from a half of century ago. In the last decade, this subject has attracted many interests, especially in complicated disorders such as behavior plasticity, memory, cancer, autoimmune disease, and addiction as well as neurod...

Nuclear Architecture and Epigenetics of Lineage Choice

Differentiation is an epigenetic process which is installed by changes of transcriptional programs over successive cellular divisions. A number of studies have reported the effects of biochemical modifications of chromatin (DNA and chromatin proteins) on the regulation of transcription. Although, these studies are able to explain how transcription of a given gene is regulated (toward activation...

The Role of Epigenetics in Cancer Drug Resistance

Cancer is caused by aberrant genetic and epigenetic changes in genes expression. DNA methylation, histone modification, and microRNAs gene deregulation are the most known epigenetic changes in different stages of cancer. Since every tumor has its own specific epigenome, any abnormal pattern is a potential biomarker for classification of different types of tumors. Despite, tumorigenesis, abnorma...

The Prospects of Epigenetics in Neuroscience