A 'Hidden' Modification of DNA plays a Key Role in Liverwort | C&EN News

liverwort
Common liverwort. Credit: Phil Pullen, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
By Monika Mondal | C&EN News April 17, 2025
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СƵ Senior Scientist Irina Arkhipova, who was not involved in the research, provides expert commentary in this article.

DNA is often seen as the blueprint of life—carrying the code to govern the development and traits of an organism—but “there are things beyond the DNA sequence,” says , a plant geneticist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA).

Through a mechanism called epigenetics, the instructions in DNA can be edited without changing the underlying code. Chemical modification is one way this can be done. For example, enzymes like methyltransferases can attach methyl groups to certain parts of DNA, typically on cytosine or adenine bases. Such chemical modifications can change how genes are expressed.

Source: A 'Hidden' Modification of DNA plays a Key Role in Liverwort | C&EN News

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