Howard Cedar

Howard Cedar established the fundamental principles of DNA methylation inheritance through cell division, demonstrating that DNMT1-mediated maintenance methylation copies parental strand methylation patterns to daughter strands, creating the molecular basis for epigenetic memory that cancer cells exploit to maintain oncogenic gene expression programs across generations. His discovery that CpG island methylation status is faithfully copied during DNA replication explained how tumor suppressor gene silencing is stably inherited in cancer cell populations without genetic mutation. His work on the interplay between DNA methylation and histone modifications defined the chromatin landscape of epigenetic memory.