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Epigenome editing

Nature Biotechnology volume 31, pages 1097–1099 (2013)Cite this article

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Technologies developed for genome editing are repurposed to study functions of chromatin modifications.

Genome-scale epigenetic maps have been generated for many different cell types and organisms and have yielded important biological insights, but such data are largely correlative. A crucial challenge in epigenetics is determining the precise roles of specific DNA or histone modifications. Two studies in this issue1,2 and one published recently in Nature3 show that epigenetic marks can be modified at a specific genomic locus, enabling fine-grained study of their activity. All three groups achieve this long-awaited goal using customizable transcription activator–like effector (TALE) proteins4—previously applied to editing the genome—to recruit chromatin-modifying enzymes to specific loci. These studies introduce powerful new tools to activate or repress specific genes and, perhaps more importantly, to analyze directly how individual chromatin modifications control chromatin states and gene expression.

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Figure 1: Site-specific recruitment of chromatin modifiers for epigenome editing.

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Affiliations

  1. Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology New York University School of Medicine, Philipp Voigt & Danny Reinberg are at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, New York, New York, USA.

    Philipp Voigt & Danny Reinberg

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  1. Philipp Voigt
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  2. Danny Reinberg
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Correspondence to Danny Reinberg.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Voigt, P., Reinberg, D. Epigenome editing. Nat Biotechnol 31, 1097–1099 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2756

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