Epigenetic modifications in neurological diseases: Natural products as epigenetic modulators a treatment strategy

Abstract

Epigenetic modifications, including DNA methylation, covalent histone modifications, and small noncoding RNAs, play a key role in regulating the gene expression. This regulatory mechanism is important in cellular differentiation and development. Recent advances in the field of epigenetics extended the role of epigenetic mechanisms in controlling key biological processes such as genome imprinting and X-chromosome inactivation. Aberrant epigenetic modifications are associated with the development of many diseases. The role of epigenetic modifications in various neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington disease, epilepsy, and multiple sclerosis is rapidly emerging. The use of epigenetic modifying drugs to treat these diseases has been the interest in recent years. A number of natural products having diverse mechanism of action are used for drug discovery. For many years, natural compounds have been used to treat various neurodegenerative diseases, but the use of such compounds as epigenetic modulators to reverse or treat neurological diseases are not well studied. In this chapter, we mainly focus on how various epigenetic modifications play a key role in neurodegenerative diseases, their mechanism of action, and how it acts as a potential therapeutic target for epigenetic drugs to treat these diseases will be discussed.