Diet and Cancer Epigenetics: A Step Towards Developing Cancer Epigenetic Diet

The remarkable breakthrough research in molecular biology and advancements in next-generation sequencing (NGS) have significantly enriched our understandings of the epigenetic regulation of gene expression. The advancement in epigenetic research also inspired the scientific interest for investigating the influence of diet on variety of degenerative diseases including cancer. However, the molecular underpinnings underlying these effects are poorly understood. The scientific enquiry as to how dietary ingredients influence epigenetic modifications that eventually regulate health was attributed with catalytic functions of the epigenetic enzymes, which are responsible for “writing” or “erasing” the epigenetic modifications. Voluminous preclinical data suggest that dietary bioactive ingredients modulate the epigenetic landscape by inhibiting/regulating the activity of HDACs, HAT, DNMTs, acetylation/deacetylation, sumyolation, chromatin remodelling, etc. These diet-induced histone modifications regulate the conformational dynamics of chromatin structure, which ultimately leads to changes in DNA accessibility by transcription machinery leading to gene expression. Variety of dietary bioactive molecules found in several foods act as dietary modulators, which alter the epigenetic landscape against the growth and proliferation of cancer. Searching such diet origin anticancer epigenetic modulators and making a consortium of such dietary sources will lead to the formulation of anticancer epigenetic diet.