Epigenetics and Infectious Pathogens: Interactions, Ploy and Perspectives

Abstract

Since the inception of life, organisms have enormously diversified, from simple unicellular to complex multicellular. As many life forms coexist in an environment, they constantly interact with each other via beneficial or harmful interactions. Humans, being part of the same environment, have confronted many hostile organisms partly comprising of disease-causing pathogens. Pathogens use humans as host for completion of their life cycle or nutrition. Regardless of their purpose, pathogens inflict profound harm to health and well-being of humankind. To name a few, millions of people have died due to the havoc caused by diseases such as plague, tuberculosis, cholera, Spanish flu, Ebola, etc. Revolution in the field of medicine has offered multiple drugs/medications and vaccinations against these pathogens, but owing to their misusage and the increasing anthropogenic rooted climate change, multidrug-resistant species have evolved, capable of attacking more smartly on the host. It has now been established that many such harmful organisms induce epigenetic modifications in the host to suppress host immunity, maintain their own latency, etc. in the course of establishing themselves. To curb this problem, epigenetic modifiers have now been formulated into drugs. These drugs have demonstrated promising results, paving way towards novel cure. This chapter is an attempt to introduce epigenetics and its modifications in host, mediated by pathogens, with an emphasis on bacteria and viruses. Finally, it gives an overview of different novel epigenetic approaches to combat these pathogens.