An article by Liyanage and colleagues (2015) attempted to shed light on the discrepancies between studies on the effects of ethanol on methyl CpG binding protein 2 (MeCP2) expression (Gangisetty et al. 2014) while also understanding the molecular mechanisms of DNA methylation at regulatory elements in the MeCP2 gene. Ethanol-induced alterations of methylation can contribute to deregulating MeCP2 expression (Liyanage, Rastegar 2014). Previous work from this group found MeCP2 expression changes following DNA methylation at adjacent regulatory elements using murine embryonic-derived NSCs, which previously had been shown to express MeCP2 and were used as a model for neural development. In this study, the authors identified whether ethanol-induced expression changes of MeCP2 are due to DNA methylation of MeCP2.
