I started to study biology at the time epigenetics became a buzzword. I first heard the term at university in 2001, and as many young enthusiastic people of the time, I did my PhD on epigenetics because it was cool. But buzzes come and go, I finished my PhD and I got bored with epigenetics. Meanwhile, I thought that my interest had been mirroring that of the community, and that the trend was towards a loss of interest for epigenetics. I was about to write a blog post entitled “The death of epigenetics” when I did a quick PubMed search and realized that the peak of popularity was... 2013. Epigenetics is not dead, it is on the rise!

Above is the number^* of PubMed hits for “epigenetics” per month since 1996, with “chromatin” shown as a reference for comparison. PubMed now displays a histogram of the occurrence of your search term over the years (check here for epigenetics). The growth is not due to articles published in late-adopting journals, since the trend-setters Cell, Nature and Science published more than half of their papers labelled “epigenetics” in the last three years.

What is epigenetics anyway?

One of...