The event organized by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) and the Instituto Nacional de Bioinformática (INB / ELIXIR-ES) brings together more than 800 scientists from areas such as computational biology, bioinformatics, systems biology, artificial intelligence, biology, medicine, and environmental sciences. Thanks to new technologies related to Artificial Intelligence, computational biology allows us to move towards personalized medicine focused on prevention and tailored to each patient.
Credit: IRB Barcelona
All the cells of an organism share the same DNA sequence, but their functions, shapes or even lifespans vary greatly. This happens because each cell reads different chapters of the genome, thus producing alternative sets of proteins and embarking on different paths. Epigenetic regulation DNA methylation is one of the most common mechanisms is responsible for the activation or inactivation of a given gene in a specific cell, defining a secondary cell-specific genetic code.
Researchers led by Dr. Modesto Orozco, head of the Molecular Modelling and Bioinformatics lab at IRB Barcelona, have described how methylation has a protein-independent regulatory role by increasing the stiffness of DNA, which affects the 3D structure of the genome, thus impacting gene activation. Present work reveals a cryptic mechanism connecting epigenetic footprinting and gene programming, which can help us to better understand development, ageing and cancer.