Epigenetics

Hello, I am back again with another blog topic. The topic of this blog is epigenetics. Before doing any research I would have not been able to tell you about epigenetics. I have a little background information on genetics because I took a lower level biology class my freshman year. Anyway let’s talk more about “epigenetics”. Epigenetics comes from the biological field and the definition of it is… “The study of changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself”. Simply put, epigenetics is additional information layered on top of the sequence of letters. (ACGT). Epigenetics is a relatively new branch of genetics that has been heralded as the most important biological discovery since DNA. Until recently, it was believed you were stuck with the genes you were born with. But now it’s known that your genes have the ability to get turned on and off and are expressed to greater or lesser degrees depending on how you live your life. Think of it like this. If genetics is like an instruction manual, then epigenetics is like taking different colored highlighters and using those highlighters to mark up and highlight different parts of the text. There are different types of epigenetic marks, and each one tells the proteins in the cell to process those parts of the DNA in certain ways. Nearly all cellular processes can also be regulated by epigenetic mechanisms. Epigenetic mechanisms can be just as important to biological events as genetic mechanisms, and can also result in stable and heritable changes. However, the big difference between genetic and epigenetic regulation is that epigenetic mechanisms do not involve a change to the DNA sequence, whereas genetic mechanisms involve the primary DNA sequence and changes or mutations to this sequence. Epigenetic regulation involves the modification of DNA and the proteins associated with DNA, which results in changes to the conformation of DNA and accessibility of other factors to DNA, without a change to the sequence of the DNA. There have been some groundbreaking early studies on how epigenetics effect inheritance, but most of the strongest evidence so far comes from research done on animals mice. There have been hints that some of these findings also apply to human inheritance, but we’ve only just started to dive in to this very mysterious phenomenon and science. You may be asking me why epigenetics matters. Epigenetics will play a key role in the prevention and cure of diseases. There are many different diseases thought to have an epigenetic components including asthma, Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, immune disorders, kidney disease, glaucoma, muscular dystrophy, and pediatric syndromes as well. Also, many psychiatric disorders including autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. In the year 2008, the U.S. National Institutes of Health committed to investing $190 million into epegenetics research to hopefully find new and better ways to treat these diseases. Epigenetics plays a big role in biology. The study of epigenetics has been around for a while but scientists and researchers has started to get more serious approximately 50 years ago. I think this is the case because technology has skyrocketed over the last 50 years. Leading to developments and breakthroughs in the study.

To learn more about epigenetics. Click on these links below…

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Epigenetics 3

Have a wonderful day!