Heredity resides not only in the DNA sequence but recent progress in the field of epigenetics has revealed that chemical modifications of DNA, such as DNA methylation, can be inherited in some cases. DNA methylation can happen in several contexts, cytosine methylation is the most common in eukaryotes and its functions have been scrutinized intensely. However, another form of DNA methylation: adenosine methylation, that mainly occurs in bacteria but also in eukaryotes, has received much less attention. In particular we start to have some idea on the rates on spontaneous methylation changes in cytosine methylation, but for adenosine methylation this has not been studied before. The goal of this project is to estimate the rate of spontaneous adenosine methylation changes and to investigate what is the role of adenosine methylation changes in the evolution of antibiotic resistance.

2024

2028