Epigenetic inheritance and aging

The Changing Concept of Epigenetics

“…In some cases the inherited disorder is caused by a mutation of the gene, but in others the defect may be epigenetic—an epimutation involving an altered methylation pattern. Epigenetic changes in methylation patterns are also involved in aging changes 23. Such findings have exciting implications for medicine, since they open up the possibility of treating some diseases by altering the epigenetic states of genes.…”

Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: Prevalence, Mechanisms, and Implications for the Study of Heredity and Evolution

“…This could lead to a more extreme phenotype (Figure 3Cii) and, possibly, to a greater fidelity of transmission. Inducing conditions might endure due to the persistence of external environmental factors (e.g., there is multi-generational exposure to a chemical), continual transmission through one sex (i.e., for several generations a particular epiallele is transmitted only through females, or only through males), or continuous transmission through old parents, thus leading to the Lansing effect (see Lamb 1994). The opposite (Figure 3Ciii) may also occur; that is, when induction in the parental generation is followed by non-inducing conditions in the subsequent offspring generations, the induced epigenetic variations may linger and gradually fade away, with some marks being lost in each generation.…”

“…The epigenetic aspects of metabolic diseases and their transgenerational effects are also being intensely studied (see Bateson et al 2004;Gluckman and Hanson 2005;Gluckman et al 2007;Petronis 2004Petronis , 2006. The epidemiological aspects of epigenetic inheritance were reviewed by Jablonka (2004b), and the importance of epigenetics for aging research has been discussed by Vanyushin (1973), Holliday (1984), Lamb (1994), and Issa (2000). The recently reported ability of pathogenic microorganisms to evolve heritable epigenetic resistance to medication (e.g., antibiotics) may be of major medical importance (Adam et al 2008), and the relevance of epigenetic inheritance for therapeutic cloning and nuclear transplantation in animals, including humans, is self-evident (see Jaenisch and Gurdon 2007).…”

Expression profiles of genes regulating dairy cow fertility: recent findings, ongoing activities and future possibilities

“…Histone modifications, like de-acetylation of histones by histone deactylases and site-specific methylation of histone H3, may trigger methylation of cytosine residues by methyltransferases (DNMT3a and DNMT3b), which results in gene silencing that is maintained over cell generations by DMNT1 (Li, 2002;Jaenisch and Bird, 2003). The epigenetic regulation of gene expression seems inevitable for multicellular organisms as it underlies the development of cell lineage-specific gene expression and phenotypes from one genotype (Jablonka and Lamb, 1998). Also, DNA methylation allows the silencing of virus-derived and potentially destabilizing repeat sequences that make up large proportions of the mammalian genome (International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, 2001).…”