The Emerging Field of Neuroepigenetics

Over the past 25 years, the broad field of epigenetics and, over the past decade in particular, the emerging field of neuroepigenetics have begun to have tremendous impact in the areas of learned behavior, neurotoxicology, CNS development, cognition, addiction, and psychopathology. However, epigenetics is such a new field that in most of these areas the impact is more in the category of fascinating implications as opposed to established facts. In this brief commentary, I will attempt to address and delineate some of the open questions and areas of opportunity that discoveries in epigenetics are providing to the discipline of neuroscience.