Biophysics is reshaping our perception of the epigenome: from changing the landscape of how we study DNA-level epigenetic marks to enabling high-throughput applications

Epigenetic research holds great promise to advance our understanding of biomarkers and regulatory processes in health and disease. An increasing number of new approaches ranging from molecular to biophysical analyses enable identifying epigenetic changes on the level of a single gene or the whole epigenome. The aim of this review is to highlight how the field is shifting from completely molecular biology driven solutions to multi-disciplinary strategies including more reliance on biophysical analysis tools. Biophysics not only offers technical advancements in imaging or structure analysis, but also helps to explore regulatory interactions. New computational methods are also being developed to meet the demand of growing data volumes and their processing. Therefore, it is important to capture these new directions in epigenetics from a biophysical perspective and discuss current challenges as well as multiple applications of biophysical methods and tools. Specifically, we gradually introduce different biophysical research methods by first considering the DNA level information and eventually higher-order chromatin structures. Moreover, we aim to highlight that the incorporation of bioinformatics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence into biophysical analysis allows gaining new insights into complex epigenetic processes. The gained understanding has already proven useful in translational and clinical research providing better patient stratification options or new therapeutic insights. Together, this offers a better readiness to transform bench-top experiments into industrial high-throughput applications with a possibility to employ developed methods in clinical practice and diagnostics

Kinetics of Hydrogen Evolution on Copper Electrode Involving Organic Acids as Proton Donors

Linear potential sweep (LPS) voltammetry was applied to study the kinetics of hydrogen evolution in solutions containing glycolic, malic, tartaric, and gluconic acids. The CE mechanism of hydrogen evolution was analyzed invoking the 2nd Fick's law equations supplemented by terms that account for chemical interactions between diffusing particles. Acids are considered as components that are capable of releasing hydrated protons taking part in the charge-transfer step. Current peaks observed on LPS voltammograms are in linear dependence on ν (ν is the potential sweep rate). They obey well-known relationships obtained for simple redox processes, provided that the concentration of oxidant is treated as total concentration of proton donors. Determination of surface concentrations as current density functions makes it possible to transform LPS voltammograms into linear Tafel plots normalized with respect to the surface concentration of hydronium ions. Similar kinetic parameters (α≈0.6 and i0≈ 10 μA cm−2) obtained at pH 3 for all OA solutions indicate that the nature of OA has no noticeable influence on the charge-transfer process