Emerging Epigenetic Maps in Atherosclerosis

Where are we? Where do we want to go? How do we get there? And for those who come along after us, how can we share what we already know about these places?Article see p 692Perhaps the simplicity of these questions, and their importance, combine to help explain the longstanding human drive to draw maps. A 14 000-year-old cave painting in Spain reportedly shows the local topography and food resources outside where it was found.1 A 9000-year-old drawing of Catalhoyuk, a Stone Age settlement in modern Turkey, is considered an aerial schematic of the village, including the nearby volcano.2 Babylonians were practicing cartography on clay tablets ≈2300 BC.3 Independent of ongoing debates about what constitutes the oldest known map, the development of different kinds of maps has often offered fundamental new insight, whether they are antiquarian Greek astronomical maps of the stars or Google Earth images that bring precise details of the world to every online device. Maps have been especially instrumental in medicine and biology. Early anatomists detailed the inner structures of the human body. By simply mapping cholera deaths in London in 1854, Dr John Snow established that the disease was spread by contaminated water and not by air, as had been presumed, helping end the epidemic.4 Landmark achievements of our time include the identification of DNA as a readable blueprint map, as more fully elaborated with the sequencing of the human genome.The recognition that distinct modifications and mechanisms, whether on the DNA itself or the histones around which DNA is coiled, could modulate gene expression, control phenotypes, influence environmental responses, and determine heritable traits—independent of any change in DNA sequence—has suggested completely new maps for understanding genetic landscapes and functional biology. Epigenetics, which includes the post-translational modifications of specific amino …