The PharmacoEpiGenetic Connection

Abstract

Epigenetics is a discipline that studies heritable changes in gene expression without structural changes in the DNA sequence. Epigenetics is one of the most rapidly developing fields in the history of biology. The concept of epigenetics has evolved since Waddington defined it in the late 1930s, becoming a multifaceted contextual discipline with influence in evolution, speciation, functional genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and obviously in species-specific health and disease [1]. Epigenetics plays an important role in phenotypic variation in different species of animal and vegetal kingdom [2]. Epigenetic memory can persist across generations. A stressinduced signal can be transmitted across multiple unexposed generations leading to persistent changes in epigenetic gene regulation [3]. Epigenetic mechanisms contribute to phenotypic variation and disparities in morbidity and mortality [4]. Epigenetics acts as an interface between the genome and the environment, and the mechanistic changes associated with the epigenetic phenomena can also be considered a sophisticated form of intracellular and intercellular communication [5]. Epigenetics is an adaptive mechanism of developmental plasticity, a phenomenon of relevance in evolutionary biology and human health and disease, which enables organisms to respond to their environment based on previous experience without changes to the underlying nucleotide sequence [6]. Genetic variation correlates with phenotypes depending upon allele-specific genetic changes linked to gene expression, DNA methylation, histone marks, and miRNA regulation of proteomic and metabolomic processes [7].