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Nature Reviews Genetics 10, 818–819 (1 December 2009) | doi:10.1038/nrg2702

Epigenetics: An expanding horizon for DNA methylation

Mary Muers

The classical view of DNA methylation in mammals is that methylation of cytosine occurs in the context of CG dinucleotides, and that methylation patterns are established during embryogenesis and maintained in somatic cells, which enables the long-term stable silencing of transcription. Two recent papers shake this conventional wisdom and show that there are unexpected aspects of this epigenetic mark that need to be explored.