Epigenomics
Methylation and gene expression
is a common epigenetic mechanism in humans and other mammals, where 70 to 80% of CpG dinucleotides
are methylated, yet in some model organisms, such as yeast and fruit fly, there is little or no DNA
methylation. DNA methylation of CpG dinucleotides is essential for plant and mammalian development, chromosome X inactivation,
genomic imprinting, chromosome stability, chromatin structure, the immobilization of transposons,
and the control of tissue-specific gene expression.
My lab investigated the relationship between methylation, gene expression, and genome composition. In Tatarinova et al. (2013) we showed that GC3 has a regulatory role involving methylation and gene expression. To show that, we selected diverse taxa (rice, thale cress, bee, and human) that varied in the modality of their GC3 distribution and tested the association between GC3, DNA methylation, and gene expression. Elhaik et al. (2013), we developed a method to predict methylation patters from genome data in rice. Some of these findings were summarized in Elhaik and Tatarinova (2012). |