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. 2016 Aug 10;3:31. doi: 10.1186/s40348-016-0056-4

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© The Author(s). 2016

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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Fig. 2 — Epigenetic mechanisms in humans. The genome has a three-dimensional structure. The DNA is configured as an alpha helix of nucleotides. (1) The addition of methyl groups to cytosines changes the configuration of the helix and hinders the transcription machinery to attach to DNA. The DNA is further organized in nucleosomes which contain 146 basepairs of DNA and eight histone proteins (4 × 2 histone proteins). (2) Modification of histones by methylation or acetylation changes the accessibility of DNA at the site of these nucleosomes. Once mRNA is produced, (3) interfering mi-RNA can regulate transcription efficiency before translation into protein can occur (adapted from figure 7.6, chapter on genetics by Michael Kabesch in Pädiatrische Pneumologie, Editors Erika von Mutius et al., Springer, ISBN 978-3-642-34827-3)