Early-life dietary nutrition can profoundly affect individual developmental fate and disease prevention. For example, the presence of absence of royal jelly determines whether the larvae of female honey bees develop into a queen (presence of jelly) or a sterile worker (absence of jelly). In a recent review article published in Clinical Epigenetics, we have reported important roles of specific diets in protection of environmental pollution-induced genetic/epigenetic disorders through the regulation of gene expression even when the DNA is not altered. Epigenetics may be one of the most importa ..read more

Advances in diagnostics and therapeutics in cancer research have allowed doctors to catch and treat cancer earlier, thus resulting in better prognoses in many cases. However, this also means that a larger number of women are being treated for cancer during what would be traditionally viewed as key reproductive years. While clinical trials of drugs examine the side effects on the patient, they do not often take into consideration the impact on that patient’s future offspring. With the evolution of genetically-based approaches to cancer treatments, and specifically epigenetically-based therapeu ..read more

Genomic imprinting is a phenomenon in which the expression of a gene depends on its parental origin, hence expression is said to be parent-of-origin specific. This process is independent of the laws of Mendelian inheritance meaning that although you receive two copies of a gene, one from each parent, one of those copies is favored depending on which parent it came from. This phenomenon was generally believed to be exclusive to mammals and flowering plants, where it has been extensively studied over the past decades. However, genomic imprinting has independently evolved at least 7 times across ..read more

Epigenetics refers to mechanisms that affect gene activity and expression without a change to the DNA sequence. Epigenetic processes are important in both plants and animals, but plants are particularly dependent on epigenetic mechanisms as they provide a fast way of altering gene activity. This is because, as sessile organisms, plants can’t just move into a more optimal environment when they need to, but instead need to rapidly alter their physiology. Plants use all of the major epigenetic mechanisms that are known to exist in eukaryotes – from DNA methylation to histone modifications to RN ..read more

We use clocks to keep track of time. When it comes to the term ‘clock’, I think of the hour glass on my dresser, the pendulum clock in my living room, my first wristwatch that I was so excited to get or the display on the top of my smart phone. We use clocks to measure duration repeatedly, including the length of our lives, also known as our ‘age’. One of the best known epigenetic clocks is the Horvath clock However, some researchers working on aging are not satisfied with traditional clocks; instead they use ‘epigenetic clocks’ for the chronological age of our tissues.These clocks consist ..read more

In recent years, research efforts in this area have grown substantially to uncover the biological and chemical mechanisms of epigenetic drugs and their targets.  At the same time, pharmaceutical companies are making major investments in this field. Transparency Market Research predicts that the Epigenetic drugs and Diagnostic Technologies market will be worth an estimated $5.7 billion by 2018. The ‘Epigenetic Drugs‘ series recently published in Clinical Epigenetics delves deeper into this arena with reviews covering the current and upcoming areas of investigation and the challenges ..read more

What everyone wants is to live a long life. However, whilst already living longer, we have realized that longevity is of little value when associated with diseases and disability. As a result, we intensely search for interventions that can extend life and improve its quality. In my former blog entry, I wrote about epigenetic diets that are proposed to supply the organism with nutrients that influence the epigenome and, supposedly, delay epigenetic drift. Today I will briefly discuss what is known about the epigenetic effect of a calorie restriction diet, without malnutrition and/or a micronut ..read more

What is meant by epigenetic aging? Epigenetic aging is a measure that uses DNA methylation levels to predict an individual’s age. It takes into account the methylation levels of many sites from different parts of the genome. What these sites have in common is that they correlate strongly with chronological age. Several DNA methylation-based predictors of age have been developed. The most widely used is the multi-tissue predictor developed by Steve Horvath. Using this marker, DNA methylation-predicted age correlates strongly with chronological age at a population level. However, in some individ ..read more

During the recent American Society of Human Genetics (#ASHG15) conference I met with Dr Hans T Bjornsson, who is Director of the Epigenetics and Chromatin Clinic at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, USA. This is a clinic that focuses directly on the epigenetic basis of diseases (that are known to have an epigenetic component), through basic research and patient clinics. At Clinical Epigenetics we’re indeed very excited to see such an institute performing important medical research. We hope this will be a growing trend, generating important epigenetic data than can then be shared be ..read more

Genome-wide association studies are no longer expected to yield the markers to fully explain the heritable susceptibility observed for many complex diseases. This realization has sparked an interest in clinical epigenetics/epigenomics, and since then the field has grown explosively. Clinical Epigenetics published a review series earlier this year providing state-of-the-art overviews of various sub-disciplines that have arisen: environmental epigenetics, nutritional epigenetics, transgenerational epigenetics and synthetic epigenetics. Hopes are high that the coming of age of these sub-dis ..read more