Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MOLECULAR SCIENCES
Volume 22, Issue 17, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/ijms22179152
Keywords
zebrafish model; epigenetics; renal diseases; microRNAs; histone modifications; DNA methylation
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Epigenetic modifications can alter gene expression through various mechanisms such as DNA methylation and histone modifications. This review focuses on the role of epigenetic changes in gene regulation, particularly in renal diseases, and highlights the potential of using the zebrafish model for studying epigenetics and discovering novel therapeutic targets. The zebrafish model offers a high-throughput screening tool to identify epigenetic alterations contributing to disease and test new substances for changing epigenetic signatures.
Epigenetic modifications are able to alter gene expression and include DNA methylation, different histone variants, and post-transcriptional modifications (PTMs), such as acetylation or phosphorylation, and through short/long RNAs, respectively. In this review, we focus on current knowledge concerning epigenetic modifications in gene regulation. We describe different forms of epigenetic modifications and explain how epigenetic changes can be detected. The relevance of epigenetics in renal diseases is highlighted with multiple examples and the use of the zebrafish model to study glomerular diseases in general and epigenetics in renal diseases in particular is discussed. We end with an outlook on how to use epigenetic modifications as a therapeutic target for different diseases. Here, the zebrafish model can be employed as a high-throughput screening tool not only to discover epigenetic alterations contributing to disease, but also to test novel substances that change epigenetic signatures in vivo. Therefore, the zebrafish model harbors the opportunity to find novel pathogenic pathways allowing a pre-selection of potential targets and compounds to be tested for renal diseases.
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