Brain, Behavior and Epigenetics

Epigenetics, once believed stable after development, has been found to occur in fully differentiated, post-mitotic central nervous system cells in response to environmental signals. This book explores the role of epigenetic risk factors in complex diseases.

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Biomedical research in the first decade of the 21st century has been marked by a rapidly growing interest in epigenetics. The reasons for this are numerous, but primarily it stems from the mounting realization that research programs focused solely on DNA sequence variation, despite their breadth and depth, are unlikely to address all fundamental aspects of human biology. Some questions are evident even to non-biologists. How does a single zygote develop into a complex multicellular organism composed of dozens of different tissues and hundreds of cell types, all genetically identical but performing very different functions? Why do monozygotic twins, despite their stunning external similarities, often exhibit significant differences in personality and predisposition to disease? If environmental factors are solely the cause of such variation, why are similar differences also observed between genetically identical animals housed in a uniform environment? Over the last couple of decades, epigenetics has undergone a significant metamorphosis from an abstract developmental theory to a very dynamic and rapidly developing branch of molecular biology. This volume represents a compilation of our current understanding about the key aspects of epigenetic processes in the brain and their role in behavior. The chapters in this book bring together some of the leading researchers in the field of behavioral epigenetics. They explore many of the epigenetic processes which operate or may be operating to mediate neurobiological functions in the brain and describe how perturbations to these systems may play a key role in mediating behavior and the origin of brain diseases.