: DNA methylation in bacteria regulates virulence, reproduction, and gene expression: Study #IndiaNEWS #Health Houston: According to research, DNA methylation in bacteria regulates virulence, reproduction,

DNA methylation in bacteria regulates virulence, reproduction, and gene expression: Study #IndiaNEWS #Health
Houston: According to research, DNA methylation in bacteria regulates virulence, reproduction, and gene expression. DNA methylation is crucial for controlling the tissue-specific gene expression that determines a cells identity, such as whether it is a skin cell or a brain cell, in other creatures, including humans.
The findings of the research were published in the journal Genome Biology.
One way cells can control the activities of their genes is by adding small chemical modifications to the DNA that determine which genes are turned on or off. Methyl groups are one of these chemical modifications or tags.
The study of DNA methylation is part of the field of epigenetics. It is important because it helps us understand why one particular type of bacteria causes a more severe disease than another or how a normal cell can change and give rise to diseases, such as cancer, said corresponding author Dr Tao Wu, assistant professor of molecular and human genetics at Baylor College of Medicine.
The Wu Lab is a cancer epigenetics lab. Its long-term goal is to overcome cancer therapeutic resistance by better understanding the role of epigenetics in this disease.
In bacteria, there are three different forms of DNA methylation. The most common is one that tags the DNA base or building block adenine (N6-methyladenine or 6mA). The other two tag the DNA base cytosine (N4-methylcytosine or 4mC and 5-methylcytosine or 5mC). Although there are many methods to study DNA methylation, a few can efficiently map the three types simultaneously, Wu explained.
It was thought that organisms other than bacteria, including mammals, mostly only used methyl-cytosine tags the 5mC to regulate gene activity. But in 2016, when I was at Yale University, we reported in Nature the discovery that DNA 6mA also is present in mammals, Wu said. This finding opened a whole new set of possibilities in the study of cancer epigenetics. The traditional methods to study the 5mC do not capture the adenine methylation in mammalian tissues. This motivated us to develop a novel method to profile not only 6mA but also 4mC and 5mC, Wu said.
In the current study, published in the journal Genome Biology, Wu and his colleagues report the development of a chemical-based sequencing method to quantify different epigenetic markers simultaneously. Their method, called NT-seq, short for nitrite treatment followed by next-generation sequencing, is a sequencing method for detecting multiple types of DNA methylation genome-wide. The method also can amplify limited clinical samples, something other methods cannot do.
We show that NT-seq can detect 6mA, 4mC and 5mC both in bacterial and non-bacterial cells, including mammalian cells, Wu said.

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