Drawing a Waddington landscape to capture dynamic epigenetics

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes a broader understanding of epigenetics beyond chromatin marks, illustrating how dynamic gene networks and Waddington landscapes depict cellular differentiation and plasticity.

Contribution

It explicitly draws Waddington landscapes to clarify the concept of dynamic epigenetics and highlights the importance of steady state mechanisms in cellular memory.

Findings

Waddington landscape effectively visualizes dynamic epigenetic states.

Steady state mechanisms ensure robust epigenetic memory.

Gene network dynamics underpin differentiation and trans-differentiation.

Abstract

Epigenetics is most often reduced to chromatin marking in the current literature, whereas this notion was initially defined in a more general context. This restricted view ignores that epigenetic memories are in fact more robustly ensured in living systems by steady state mechanisms with permanent molecule renewal. This misconception is likely to result from misleading intuitions and insufficient dialogues between traditional and quantitative biologists. To demystify dynamic epigenetics, its most famous image, a Waddington landscape and its attractors, are explicitly drawn. The simple example provided is sufficient to highlight the main requirements and characteristics of dynamic gene networks, underlying cellular differentiation, de-differentiation and trans-differentiation.