DNA methylation articles from across Nature Portfolio

The insertion of the stress-responsive transposable element (TE) ONSEN into a critical flowering regulator gene confers an adaptive response to herbicide treatment in Arabidopsis thaliana natural accessions.

Investigation on the effect of DNA methylation on the cooperation of transcription factors.

Epigenetic profiling using reduced representation bisulfite sequencing provides preliminary insights into the role of DNA methylation in ageing and bovine respiratory disease in UK dairy cattle.

This study reports the discovery of a retrotransposon insertion in the FLC gene conferring an environmentally dependent control mechanism mediated by DNA methylation that drives the adaptation of natural Arabidopsis populations to herbicide exposure.

The sex ratio is often not even in plants, and its molecular mechanisms have been little known. The study found that an X chromosome-encoded gene, named HaMSter in persimmon, influences sex ratio distortion via seed viability through a regulatory mechanism involving random DNA methylation.

DNA glycosylases license expression of a set of pollen-specific, highly expressed maize genes that are of interest not only because of their transposon-like DNA methylation but also because of their predicted importance in cell wall modification.

The insertion of the stress-responsive transposable element (TE) ONSEN into a critical flowering regulator gene confers an adaptive response to herbicide treatment in Arabidopsis thaliana natural accessions.

Aging-related DNA methylation changes are numerous. Their precise measurement has opened new avenues to explore aging-related disease pathology, including the construction of chronological and biological age predictors (termed DNA methylation ‘clocks’). Three studies investigate the substantial stochastic contribution to these epigenetic changes and further our understanding of aging biology, as well as of these predictors.

The replicational age of single cells provides a temporal reference for tracking cell fate transition trajectories. The computational framework EpiTrace measures cell age using single-cell ATAC-seq data, specifically by considering chromatin accessibility at clock-like genomic loci, enabling the reconstruction of the history of developmental and pathological processes.

The ATP-dependent chromatin remodeller DDM1 has a vital role in plant DNA methylation, influencing gene silencing and suppression of transposable elements. The structure of DDM1 in complex with nucleosome in different states of the ATP hydrolysis process reveals the molecular mechanism underlying chromatin remodelling by DDM1.

The effect of DNA methylation on gene expression has been known for decades. However, the mechanism by which DNA methylation functions to repress transcription has remained a major question in the field. Wang et al. now narrow this gap through their examination of the methylation binding protein MBD2 and expose how DNA methylation is read upstream of transcriptional repression.