Summary
With a constant genome, it is epigenetics - sequence-independent genetic control processes - that exert the molecular forces necessary to help cells remember their molecular heritage, turn somatic cells into stem cells, and forever silence Barr bodies in sex chromosome inactivation. The National Institutes of Health acknowledged as much with its recently launched Roadmap Epigenomics Program, which seeks to map epigenetic modifications during normal development as a first step towards understanding how these processes can go awry. Young combined ChIP with homemade microarrays ("chips") of 6,361 yeast intergenic fragments to obtain a genome-wide perspective on Gal4 and Ste12 binding - proteins involved in galactose metabolism and mating pheromone responses, respectively. [...] in 2006 Young and Rudolf Jaenisch, also of MIT, used it to map genome-wide Polycomb group protein binding in murine and human embryonic stem cells.
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Extract
Modifications Abound
Epigenetic changes are pivotal events in development and disease. With a constant genome, it is epigenetics - sequence-independent genetic control processes - that exert the molecular forces necessary to help cells remember their molecular heritage, turn somatic cells into stem cells, and forever silence Barr bodies in sex chromosome inactivation.
The National Institutes of Health acknowledged as much with its recently launched Roadmap Epigenomics Program, which seeks to map epigenetic modifications during normal development as a first step towards understanding how these processes can go awry. But how do you collect such data?Epigenetics encompasses disparate control mechanisms that have little to do with DNA sequence per se. Methylcytosine often...See the full content of this document
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