Roadmap Epigenomics Project Releases Latest "Annotations" to the Human Genome

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Newswise The human genome project captured the public imagination when its first draft was published 14 years ago this week in the international science journal Nature, but the epigenome may hold the real promise for conquering disease.

While your genome is the same in every cell in your body (except for the gametes), the epigenome is made up of chemical compounds that determine which part of the genome is available for instructing the cells to make proteins. Its why a skin cell, for example, knows its a skin cell.

Medical researchers have high hopes for the knowledge they will gain from the massive effort to map the epigenome now under way under the umbrella of the Roadmap Epigenomics Project of the National Institutes of Health. The latest fruits of this effort appear in the Feb. 18 issue of Nature.

Mapping the epigenome will be extraordinarily useful for people who want to study diseases, said Dr. David A Bennett, the Robert C. Borwell Professor of Neurological Sciences, and director of the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center.

Cracking the epigenomes complicated codes will allow researchers to understand the a key part of the molecular basis of disease and eventually to control how genes change to cure and hopefully even prevent many common diseases.

The epigenome presents an astonishing number of possibilities for gene expression, all the different permutations and combinations, its complexity orders and orders of magnitude beyond that of the basic genome sequence, Bennett said.

If the Human Genome Project, which got under way in the late 1980s, provided a genetic map of human genome, then the Roadmap Epigenomics Project now under way will annotate that map.

A map only becomes useful to the traveler when its annotated. Where are the towns? Where are the villages? Where are the ports? Bennett said.

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Roadmap Epigenomics Project Releases Latest "Annotations" to the Human Genome