Epigenetic Arbitration of Cell Fate Decisions: Tipping the Bias

Epigenetic modifications of nucleosomal histones are thought to mediate transcriptional states and impose heritable instructions upon differentiation. In a paper of Torres-Padilla and colleagues in Nature, protein modification at arginine residues, namely of core histones, is correlated with cell fate determination at the 4-cell stage in the mouse embryo. This represents the first link of global epigenetic instructions associated with specification of early cell lineages