National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-0540.
Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol. 2014 Jan 1;6(1):a018200. doi: 10.1101/cshperspect.a018200.
The term "epigenetics" was originally used to denote the poorly understood processes by which a fertilized zygote developed into a mature, complex organism. With the understanding that all cells of an organism carry the same DNA, and with increased knowledge of mechanisms of gene expression, the definition was changed to focus on ways in which heritable traits can be associated not with changes in nucleotide sequence, but with chemical modifications of DNA, or of the structural and regulatory proteins bound to it. Recent discoveries about the role of these mechanisms in early development may make it desirable to return to the original definition of epigenetics.
“表观遗传学”一词最初用于描述受精卵发育成成熟复杂生物体的过程，尽管这一过程尚未被完全理解。随着人们逐渐认识到生物体的所有细胞都携带相同的 DNA，并深入了解基因表达的机制，这一定义发生了变化，转而关注可遗传特征与核苷酸序列变化无关，而是与 DNA 化学修饰或与其结合的结构和调节蛋白有关的方式。这些机制在早期发育中的作用的最新发现可能使人们希望回到表观遗传学的原始定义。
