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Largest-ever epigenetic study launched

A hugely ambitious study of epigenetic effects in identical twins was launched today, the largest of its kind to date. The Epitwin Project is a collaboration between TwinsUK, a research group based at King’s College London, and BGI, the Chinese DNA sequencing powerhouse in Shenzhen.

Epigenetics is an emerging field focused on the effects that chemical reactions in the body have on gene expression. Such reactions may occur randomly, or be caused by environmental factors. The result, DNA methylation, can be fleeting, but may also persist for generations.

The researchers will investigate the methylation patterns of 20 million genes (called CpG islands) in 5000 twins, and look for differences between twin-pairs. This should help to explain why identical twins don’t always develop the same diseases, and to identify which genes are responsible.


In a press release, co-lead researcher Tim Spector, Director of TwinsUK and a genetic epidemiologist at King’s College London, said: “Finding the crucial differences between twins will lead us to the key genes that are being turned on and off, and so to the cause of disease, with great potential to find key targets for drug treatments,”

“The fact that twins are such a marvellous natural experiment, combined with the hundreds of disease details and traits on the twins that we have collected over 17 years, offer a unique study opportunity. So far this type of study has only been attempted on a handful of twins, so we want to scale it up – one thousand fold.”

Researchers hope that epigenetics will help to answer questions about the origins of diseases which we know are not caused by either genes or environment in isolation. This study will focus initially on obesity, diabetes, allergies, heart disease, osteoporosis and longevity. The team are ultimately aiming to identify therapeutic targets for the development of novel drugs.

Investigating patterns of DNA methylation is a complicated business, much more so than simply sequencing DNA. Patterns of methylation vary substantially between different tissues in the same organism, and also according to its developmental stage. There is no single code for each organism, as there is for DNA.

BGI is ideally suited to generating the data. Project co-leader Jun Wang’s team have sequenced the genomes of a number of species, including Giant Pandas, rice and silkworms (see Nature’s feature on BGI, “Chinese bioscience: The sequence factory”).

Manel Esteller, a geneticist at the Spanish National Cancer Centre in Madrid, says he is impressed by the ambition of the project, adding that he does not envy the task of analysing and interpreting the “huge amount of data”, which represents “a lot of bioinformatic effort”.

The costs of the project, estimated at around $30m will be shared between the participating institutions.

Posted on behalf of Joseph Milton.

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