Howard Cedar

Howard Cedar made pioneering milestone contributions establishing the fundamental role of DNA methylation in gene regulation, demonstrating in the 1980s that CpG methylation directly silences gene transcription and that methylation patterns are faithfully inherited through cell division by DNMT1 maintenance methyltransferase. His work with Aharon Razin established the conceptual framework for understanding how DNA methylation functions as an epigenetic memory system that maintains cell type-specific gene expression patterns, and how aberrant methylation in cancer disrupts this system. He characterized allele-specific methylation at imprinted loci and its loss in cancer (loss of imprinting). His foundational discoveries underpin the entire field of cancer DNA methylation.