The field of epigenetics is an emerging area. It aims to strengthen …

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Epigenesis was unknown during the time of Gregor Mendel
• Epigenesis
• DNA Methylation and Histone Deacetylation
• Epigenetic Regulation of Development and Tissue Specificity
• Methylation of CpG Islands
• Epigenetic Regulation of Imprinted Genes
• Variable expressivity of genes
• Epigenetics and Clinical Applications
• Human Epigenome Project
• Acknowledgements
• References
• Table 1
• Table 2
• Table 3
• Figures

Gregor Mendel, a monk in the Augustinian monastery at Brunn, Austria in 1866, intuitively attempted an independent observation using garden pea plants. He must have made a serendipitous observation of a few set of characters in a number of plants comprising of a few generations and deduced profound Laws of Inheritance.  They invariably constituted the basis for the genesis of the field of genetics.  The concepts of genes, genome and epigenome have appeared at a later time embedding the principles of Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance.   Incidentally, the characters chosen by Gregor Mendel to demonstrate the patterns of inheritance must have been under the influence of epigenome.  However, providentially there must not have been epimutations for the chosen characters in the short-term experiments on pea plants conducted by Mendel. Hence, the results obtained during his observations were unique that they followed in an arithmetic fashion viz. 1:2:1, 3:1, and 9:3:3:1 etc. (8) without expressing variegation among the chosen pairs of characters namely tall and dwarf plants and round and wrinkled seeds.