Understanding Epigenetics from Dynamic Perspective

Epigenetics is an emerging field of science that studies heritable changes caused by activation and deactivation of genes without any change in the genomic DNA information. In other words, epigenetics is the study to elucidate how environment and our behavior can cause changes that affect the way our genes function. Many types of regulatory mechanisms in epigenetics, such as DNA modification and numerous types of histone modification has been reported. Steady state recognition of histone modifications and their localizations on genome has been reported, however, it is still uncertain how the modification is dynamically recognized and contribute for establishing higher order structure in nuclei. In this article, we introduce our recent trials to analyze protein with chemical modifications and/or intrinsic disorder regions by combining biochemistry, organic chemistry and ESR, and also show future plan to utilize neutron scattering to further characterize the relevant proteins.