Autoimmune diseases are enigmatic and complex, and most been associated with epigenetic changes. Epigenetics describes changes in gene expression related to environmental influences mediated by a variety of effectors that alter the three-dimensional structure of chromatin and facilitate transcription factor or repressor binding. Recent years have witnessed a dramatic change and acceleration in epigenetic editing approaches, spurred on by the discovery and later development of the CRISPR/Cas9 system as a highly modular and efficient site-specific DNA binding domain. The purpose of this article is to offer a review of epigenetic editing approaches to date, with a focus on alterations of DNA methylation, and to describe a few prominent published examples of epigenetic editing. We will also offer as an example work done by our laboratory demonstrating epigenetic editing of the FOXP3 gene in human T cells. Finally, we discuss briefly the future of epigenetic editing in autoimmune disease.

自身免疫性疾病是谜和复杂的，并且大多数与表观遗传学改变有关。表观遗传学描述了基因表达的变化，该变化与环境影响有关，这些环境影响是由各种效应子介导的，这些效应子改变了染色质的三维结构并促进了转录因子或阻遏物的结合。近年来，表观遗传编辑方法发生了巨大的变化和加速，这是由于CRISPR / Cas9系统被发现并随后开发为高度模块化和高效的位点特异性DNA结合域而引起的。本文的目的是提供迄今为止的表观遗传编辑方法的综述，重点是DNA甲基化的改变，并描述表观遗传编辑的一些著名的公开实例。人T细胞中的FOXP3基因。最后，我们简要讨论了自身免疫性疾病中表观遗传编辑的未来。