DNA Methylation Dynamics in Health and Disease

Dear Colleagues,

Epigenetic processes are the main mechanisms that cells use to regulate spatio-temporal expression patterns during development. Among epigenetic machineries, DNA methylation has attracted a great deal of interest in the scientific community over the years. Despite its high stability in the genome, it has been widely demonstrated that the addition and removal of a methyl group to a CG doublet follows specific trajectories that lead the cells to acquire, maintain, and read their genome messages in a plastic manner. In this scenario, DNA methylation assumes a key role in the underlying developmental or pathological processes. During mammalian development, methylation and demethylation events occur, and specific DNA methylation profiles are sculpted for each somatic cell. In this way, DNA methylation decides how and where genes turn on or off in each cell type.  Thus, an alteration in the DNA methylation picture during development may lead to several disorders, even later in life. Therefore, many efforts have been made to disentangle the active variations of the DNA methylation landscape and to correlate them to physiological and pathological processes. Moreover, the recent and extraordinary advances in single-cell technologies and ultra-deep sequencing have made it possible to depict the DNA methylation panorama at an unprecedented resolution and with extremely high accuracy. New insight in cell-to-cell DNA methylation heterogeneity, together with recent findings on different kinds of cytosine modifications (hydroxymethylation, etc.) and the emerging dynamic nature of DNA methylation and demethylation events, open novel unexpected roads for DNA methylation studies—especially in discerning stochastic from well-orchestrated epigenetic events.

This Collection will, therefore, focus on the dynamics of DNA methylation in biological processes, such as imprinting, X-inactivation, and DNA methylation changes during development and stem cell differentiation. It will also discuss the correlation between gene-specific and genome-wide DNA methylation changes in diseases such as cancer, genetic diseases, and neuropsychiatric diseases. Finally, it will give attention to the genomic distribution of DNA methylation at high resolution in various organisms, cell types, and diseases.

Prof. Dr. Lorenzo Chiariotti
Dr. Mariella Cuomo
Collection Editors

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