From Genome to Epigenome: A new perspective towards understanding complex diseases

In Eukaryotes, nuclear DNA or the Genome is organized with help of basic proteins into an orderly packaged compact structure called chromatin. Genes adopt cell type specific chromatin architecture in response to developmental programs and environmental cues. Such cell type specific conversion of genome to epigenome is associated with specific expression pattern of genes that eventually determines the cell fate. It is becoming increasingly apparent that epigenetic marks reflect the functional state of the genome. The past decade has witnessed the explosion of information in biomedical sciences due to the availability of genome sequences and the development of high throughput techniques that assay DNA and histone modifications. I will summarize the technological breakthroughs and also discuss how they will enable us to study disease susceptibility and presumably take us towards personalized medicine.