A group of scientists from Childrens Hospital Oakland Research Institute and UC Berkeley report the first mapping of genome methylation（甲基化） in the fruit-fly Drosophila melanogaster in their paper Genome methylation in D. melanogaster is found at specific short motifs1（图案） and is independent of DNMT2 activity, published this month in Genome Research. This paper represents a major advance in the study of DNA2 methylation in insects. No previous study has succeeded in pinpointing3 the location of DNA methylation in the fly genome. The common opinion in the field was that the fly does not have genomic methylation. But Drs. Sachiko Takayama and Joseph Dhahbi, co-first authors who carried out the key work, and Drs. David Martin and Dario Boffelli, who led the project, found otherwise. The authors were able to detect genomic methylation in the fly by solving the main technical hurdle4: fly methylation is relatively5 rare, and they developed a sensitive method that allowed them to detect it.Why is this finding important Methylation is a stable chemical modification6 of the genome; in humans and other vertebrates it participates in controlling when and where genes7 are on and off, but its functions in other organisms are not understood. The finding suggests that genome methylation may have a hitherto（迄今） uncharacterized function. While the authors still do not know what genome methylation does in the fly, they were able to find that the DNA sequence patterns that associate with methylation are very different from the patterns seen in humans, or in other animal or plant species to date.Drosophila is one of the classic model organisms, with very well established tools to study its biology. The researchers description of methylation in the fly will facilitate the use of this powerful experimental system to study methylation. Drosophila has only one known enzyme8 that could establish DNA methylation, and the researchers show that this enzyme is not responsible for the methylation patterns they detected. The fly genome has been studied very deeply, but the finding suggests that a new enzyme lies undiscovered within it.
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1 motifs n. （文静作品等的）主题；中心思想；基本模式；基本图案 参考例句： I try to develop beyond the old motifs. 我力求对传统的花纹图案做到推陈出新。 来自辞典例句 American Dream is one of the most important motifs of American literature. “美国梦”是美国文学非常重要的母题之一。 来自网络
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