Nutrition, Histone Epigenetic Marks, and Disease

The dietary intake of essential nutrients and bioactive food compounds is a process that occurs on a daily basis for the entire life span. Therefore, your diet has a great potential to cause changes in the epigenome. Known histone modifications include acetylation, methylation, biotinylation, poly(ADP-ribosylation), ubiquitination, and sumoylation. Some of these modifications depend directly on dietary nutrients. For other modifications, bioactive dietary compounds may alter the activities of enzymes that establish or remove histone marks, thereby altering the epigenome. This chapter provides an overview of diet-dependent epigenomic marks in histones and their links with human health