Edited by Andy T. Y. Lau and Amy Yan-Ming Xu
Cross-journal thematic series, “Alternative Medicine and Epigenetics” is closed for submissions.
Our epigenetic state is dynamic and subjected to change. A healthy diet could lead to a more favorable epigenetic state while a bad lifestyle could lead to a compromised epigenetic state, which ultimately affect longevity or the risk of various diseases. As for this plasticity, finding ways that can modulate the abnormal epi-marks on the chromatin are becoming useful in epigenetic engineering. It is reasonable to anticipate that different human diseases would manifest with unique, aberrant epigenetic modifications among individuals, which provide disease-associated global epigenetic signatures.
Alternative medicine (also known as unconventional medicine) encompasses various subcategories, such as acupuncture, aromatherapy, chiropractic, herbal medicine, reflexology, and vitamin/mineral therapy (some of which require more expert guidance while some can be described as self-motivated). Regardless of the severity of one’s symptoms/complications, these alternative medicinal approaches do demonstrate amazing results, such as relieving the onset of disease complications and healing of diseases ultimately. Moreover, some of these approaches are also beneficial for disease prevention. Altogether, alternative medicine is gaining more and more attention in society and in science. Interestingly, like conventional medicine, the effects of unconventional medicine might be mediated by epigenetic mechanisms. Indeed, recent studies demonstrated epigenetic effects exert by some subcategories of alternative medicine. In this thematic series, we welcome research and review articles that focus on the complex realm between alternative medicine and epigenetic regulation.
This collection of articles is not sponsored and articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process. Please find out more about our journals and their policies (here for Clinical Epigenetics; here for Epigenetics Communications). Submission guidelines can be found here for Clinical Epigenetics/ here for Epigenetics Communications, and please submit to the series via our submission system (here for Clinical Epigenetics; here for Epigenetics Communications; there will be a field for which you can indicate if you are submitting to this series). All submissions should be made by June 1st, 2023.
We accept original research articles, reviews, perspectives, and opinion articles. We explicitly welcome well-executed studies that showcase and discuss alternative conclusions/interpretations of well-established epigenetic phenomena, as well as technically sound studies that “fail” to prove a scientific hypothesis (so-called “negative data”). Altogether, we aim for this Series to provide a comprehensive reference work of the many exciting developments in the field.
