Double honours for Emma Rawlins: EMBO Member and Professor of Developmental Physiology
July 9, 2024
Read more
1984, not the story you think
40 years ago genomic imprinting was discovered
Forty years ago, two labs, one in Cambridge and one in Philadelphia, independently published groundbreaking papers describing genomic imprinting. Azim Surani conducted one of these landmark studies.
The genomic imprinting phenomenon confers functional differences between parental genomes that persist during development and throughout life, stemming from the inheritance of epigenetic asymmetry from the parental germlines.
Anne Ferguson-Smith and Marisa Bartolomei recount this significant discovery, which has greatly influenced research on epigenetic mechanisms and inheritance in mammals, with a crucial role in regulating development and shaping evolution. Genomic imprinting provides a fundamental paradigm for investigating the epigenetic regulation of gene expression during mammalian development and insights into specific human diseases affecting growth, mammalian behaviour, placental functions, metabolism, and neuronal disorders.
