Methylation refers to a chemical modification of DNA and this modification can occur in millions of positions in the DNA sequence. Until now, scientists believed that this epigenetic phenomenon actively reduced the expression of certain genes. Today, a team of researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, led by Emmanouil Dermitzakis, Louis-Jeantet Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, reveals that this is not always the case and that DNA methylation may play both a passive and active role in gene regulation. The mechanistic relationships between DNA sequence variability and gene expression therefore prove to be more complex and variable than originally assumed.
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