Epigenetics and Nutrition - Epigenetics and Nutrition - Open Access Pub

Epigenetic mechanisms based on DNA methylation, histone modifications and RNA interference have recently showed important association to the development of a wide variety of diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular, metabolic, skin, autoimmune diseases and neurologic disorders. In the context of preventive aspects, the importance of nutrition on epigenetic function has been revealed. Therefore, drastic changes in dietary modifications may contribute to reduced disease risk. For instance, dietary intervention has been showed to affect DNA methylation in Alzheimer’s disease patients. Moreover, maternal high-fat diet can regulate gene expression through promoter histone modifications. Most importantly, RNA interference and particularly micro-RNA mediated regulation of gene expression has been linked to disease development. Remarkably, dietary intake has been demonstrated to significantly affect various miRNAs and their regulation on gene function. In this review, the relationship between epigenetics and disease and development of drugs based on epigenetic targets is presented as well as the influence of dietary intake on epigenetic mechanisms and its effect on disease prevention and therapy will be discussed. DOI 10.14302/issn.2379-7835.ijn-14-603 The importance of nutrition in relation to disease prevention and therapeutic interventions has become evident during the past few years. In fact, the daily food intake presents the most important “drugs” used by every one of us 1. Furthermore, the recent progress in genome sequencing and the establishment of nutrigenomics has further revealed the close connection between nutrition and disease 2. In addition, recently nutritional scientists have introduced the term foodomics to describe as the comprehensive high-throughput approach for the exploitation of food science in relation to the improvement of human nutrition 3. In parallel, new findings have closely linked epigenetic mechanisms to disease development, which can be substantially affected by dietary interventions and life-style modifications 4. Therefore, epigenetics has become an important factor also in modern drug discovery and development. Epigenetic functions can be defined as mechanisms outside the scope of conventional genetic activities and therefore do not generate any modifications of the primary DNA sequence 5. The three main mechanisms of epigenetics are DNA methylation, histone modifications and RNA interference. Concerning DNA methylations, generally a methyl group (CH3) is covalently added to the 5’-position of cytosine upstream of guanosine