This volume provides an account of the first major international symposium on Genomic Imprinting which was held under the auspices of the Bristish Society for Developmental Biology in April 1990...

An extraordinary diversity of genetic phenomena are encompassed under the term 'genomic imprinting'. These range from sex determination and germ cell differentiation, position effect variegation, non-reciprocal phenotypes in plants and animals in interspecific hybrids, yeast mating types, human genetic disorders such as Huntington's disease, and certain childhood tumors, asexual reproduction, X-chromosome inactivation and control of development in mammals. All these phenomena depend on epigenetic mechanisms for control of gene expression which operate through modification of DNA...