Inheritance of Acquired Characters of Modern Life Style

The book describes that the acquired factors of our life style can be inherited without changing DNA sequence. This science is called epigenetics-the term which was coined by Wadington in 1940. This fascinating new science's studies show the influence of environment and life style on the expression of genes through DNA methylation and post-translation histone modifications. Epigenetic manipulation of cellular phenotype is also driven by alteration of chromatin structure by covalent histone modifications and incorporation of histone variants into the nucleosomes. The effect of prenatal and postnatal stress during early life causes many complications like post-traumatic stresss, suicidal and terrorist behavior, diseases such as Epilepsy, Alziemer's disease, Cancer, peptic ulcers etc, and drug addiction in later life of humans. Similarly the epigenetics of autoimmune diseases is also discussed.