Genome complexity: epigenetic controls (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, March 20, 2014, 17:06 (3682 days ago) @ David Turell

New mechanisms found:-
"The discovery made by a 12-member all-Indiana University team of scientists led by IU biologist and biochemist Craig Pikaard provides important new insight into how plant cells know to silence a genetic locus—that specific place on a chromosome where a gene is located—in every successive generation.
 
Rather than rely on intrinsic, DNA sequence-based information, the cells instead must recall the need to silence specific loci by relying on chemical marks displayed on the complex of DNA and proteins called chromatin. Addition, or removal, of one-carbon (methyl) or two-carbon (acetyl) chemical tags are ways of modifying chromatin that can impart additional, epigenetic (literally, "above genetic") information to a locus beyond the genetic information encoded in the DNA."-
 Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-03-gene-silencing-molecular-memory-tags.html#jCp