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Epigenetics Components of Aging in the Central Nervous System

  • Review
  • Published:
Neurotherapeutics

Abstract

This review highlights recent discoveries that have shaped the emerging viewpoints in the field of epigenetic influences in the central nervous system (CNS), focusing on the following questions: i) How is the CNS shaped during development when precursor cells transition into morphologically and molecularly distinct cell types, and is this event driven by epigenetic alterations?; ii) How do epigenetic pathways control CNS function?; iii) What happens to “epigenetic memory” during aging processes, and do these alterations cause CNS dysfunction?; iv) Can one restore normal CNS function by manipulating the epigenome using pharmacologic agents, and will this ameliorate aging-related neurodegeneration? These and other still unanswered questions remain critical to understanding the impact of multifaceted epigenetic machinery on the age-related dysfunction of CNS.

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Acknowledgments

YZ is a Buck Institute Research Fellow, and experiments from VVL laboratory are supported by NIH R21 AG043921 and Buck Institute Trust funds. We apologize to our colleagues for omission of so many important research contributions owing to the space constraints of this review. We thank J. Jenkins and L. Hankock for help with the manuscript preparation. We acknowledge members of the Lunyak laboratory for helpful discussions. No real or perceived conflict of interest is declared. Full conflict of interest disclosures are available in the electronic supplementary material for this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Buck Institute for Research on Aging, 8001 Redwood Boulevard, Novato, CA, 94945-1400, USA

    Yue-Qiang Zhao & Victoria V. Lunyak

  2. Department of Plastic Surgery, Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Yue-Qiang Zhao

  3. School of Biology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    I. King Jordan

  4. PanAmerican Bioinformatics Institute, Santa Marta, Magdalena, Colombia

    I. King Jordan

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  1. Yue-Qiang Zhao
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  2. I. King Jordan
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  3. Victoria V. Lunyak
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Correspondence to Victoria V. Lunyak.

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Zhao, YQ., Jordan, I.K. & Lunyak, V.V. Epigenetics Components of Aging in the Central Nervous System. Neurotherapeutics 10, 647–663 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13311-013-0229-y

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