Specific Gene Expression and Epigenetics : The Interplay Between the Genome and Its Environment

This title includes a number of Open Access chapters.

This new volume on gene expression and epigenetics discusses environmental effects related to specific gene expression. The book also shows methods for bioinformatic analysis of the epigenome. The book is broken into two sections: the first looks at eukaryotic DNA methylation and the second addresses how to integrate genomic medicine into clinical practice.

The book includes chapters on these topics:

• Gene expression in colon cancer tissue

• Epigenetics in human acute kidney injury

• Embryologically relevant candidate genes in MRKH patients

• DNA methylation in common skeletal disorders

• Causal relationships in genomics

• Predicting severe asthma exacerbations in children

• Epigenetic understanding of gene-environment interactions in psychiatric disorders

Kasirajan Ayyanathan, PhD, received his PhD from the Department of Biochemistry, Indian Institute of Science. Subsequently, at Temple University School of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, he conducted post-doctoral research on the signal transduction by purinergic receptors, a class of G-Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCR), in erythroleukemia cancer cells. Next, he was trained as a staff scientist at the Wistar Institute, Philadelphia, for almost ten years and studied transcription regulation, chromatin, and epigenetic regulatory mechanisms in cancer. Currently, he is at the Center for Molecular Biology and Biotechnology as a research associate professor at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton. He is the recipient of the Chern Memorial Award, presented by the Wistar Institute, and Howard Temin Career Research Award, presented by the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Ayyanathan is well trained in molecular biology, cell biology, and biochemistry with a main focus on studying transcription factors and gene regulation. He has contributed to several projects such as the generation of conditional transcriptional repressors that are directed against the endogenous oncogenes to inhibit malignant growth, the establishment of stable cell lines that express chromatin integrated transcriptional repressors and reporter genes to study the epigenetic mechanisms of KRAB repression, and identification of novel SNAG repression domain interacting proteins to understand their roles in transcriptional repression and oncogenesis. Dr. Ayyanathan has published several research articles in peer-reviewed journals in these subject areas.