Pain-Induced Chromatin Modifications

Abstract Recent years have seen a surging number of epigenetic studies and rapid progress in understanding of epigenetic mechanisms of gene regulation and their dysfunctions in the pathogenesis of neurological diseases such as chronic pain. As we gain increasing knowledge on the epigenetic machinery for transcriptional regulation of gene expression, all major processes of the epigenetic regulations identified so far have been implicated in the pathogenesis of pain, including histone acetylation and methylation, noncoding RNAs, and DNA methylation. This chapter reviews and summarizes research development and advances in these areas of pain epigenetics over the past decade, focusing on new findings in the last few years that address methylation and demethylation on histone proteins and DNA in pain-induced chromatin modifications.