This book reviews the chemical, regulatory, and physiological mechanisms of protein arginine and lysine methyltransferases, as well as nucleic acid methylations and methylating enzymes. Protein and nucleic acid methylation play key and diverse roles in cellular signalling and regulating macromolecular cell functions.

Protein arginine and lysine methyltransferases are the predominant enzymes that catalyse S-adenosylmethionine (SAM)-dependent methylation of protein substrates. These enzymes catalyse a nucleophilic substitution of a methyl group to an arginine or lysine side chain nitrogen (N) atom. Cells also have additional protein methyltransferases, which target other amino acids in peptidyl side chains or N-termini and C-termini, such as glutamate, glutamine, and histidine. All these protein methyltransferases use a similar mechanism. In contrast, nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) are substrates for methylating enzymes, which employ various chemical mechanisms to methylatenucleosides at nitrogen (N), oxygen (O), and carbon (C) atoms.

This book illustrates how, thanks to there ability to expand their repertoire of functions to the modified substrates, protein and nucleic acid methylation processes play a key role in cells.

Chapter 1. Establishment, Erasure and Synthetic Reprogramming of DNA Methylation in Mammalian Cells

Chapter 2. Origin and Mechanisms of DNA Methylation Dynamics in Cancers
Chapter 3. CpG Islands Methylation Alterations in Cancer: Functionally Intriguing Security Locks, Useful Early Tumor Biomarkers
Chapter 4. Histone and DNA Methylome in Neurodegenerative, Neuropsychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Disorders
Chapter 5. DNA Methylation in Neuronal Development and Disease
Chapter 6. Functional Implications of Dynamic DNA Methylation for the Developing, Aging and Diseased Brain
Chapter 7. The Methylome of Bipolar Disorder: Evidence from Human and Animal Studies
Chapter 8. DNA Methylation in Multiple Sclerosis
Chapter 9. Early Life Stress and DNA Methylation
Chapter 10. Regulation of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine Distribution by the TET Enzymes
Chapter 11. Epigenetic Alterations: The Relation Between Occupational Exposure and Biological Effects in Humans
Chapter 12. DNA Methylation: Biological Implications and Modulation of its Aberrant Dysregulation
Chapter 13. Functions and Dynamics of Methylation in Eukaryotic mRNA
Chapter 14. The Role of mRNA m⁶A in Regulation of Gene Expression
Chapter 15. G9a and G9a-like Histone Methyltransferases and Their Effect on Cell Phenotype, Embryonic Development, and Human Disease
Chapter 16. Biomolecular Recognition of Methylated Histones
Chapter 17. The Role of Protein Lysine Methylation in the Regulation of Protein Function - Looking Beyond the Histone Code
Chapter 18. Secondary Structures of Histone H3 Proteins with Unmethylated and Methylated Lysine-4 and -9 Resiudes; Characterization Using Circular Dichroism Spectroscopy
Chapter 19. Asymmetric Dimethylation on Arginine (ADMA) of Histones in Development, Differentiation and Disease
Chapter 20. A Switch for Transcriptional Activation and Repression: Histone Arginine Methylation
Chapter 21. Aberrant Epigenomic Regulatory Networks in Multiple Myeloma and Strategies for their Targeted Reversal
Chapter 22. Metabolic Deregulations Affecting Chromatin Architecture: One-carbon Metabolism and Krebs Cycle Impact Histone Methylation
Chapter 23. Histone Methylome of the Human Parasite Schistosoma Mansoni.