In this paper, Zhang et al. use the model plant Arabidopsis to analyze the role of methylation in heterochromatin regulation. Arabidopsis was previously known to show stability in heritability of epialleles across generations. This study found that levels of methylation within euchromatin genes is inversely correlated with heterochromatin methylation. The study also found that genes that are methylated at CG sites at the regulatory regions are more likely to be methylated at non-CG sites and become silenced. The authors suggest that inherent variability in an organism's ability to maintain patterns of DNA methylation can lead to phenotypic changes leading to speciation in Arabidopsis and other plants.
Audrey Tjahjadi
Link to original article: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/9/4874
No comments:
Post a Comment