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Category Archives: epigenetics

Are genes our puppet masters, or just a single link in a complex chain?

In addition to DNA sequences, the structures that compact DNA can be passed on as cells divide. This is called epigenetic inheritance.
Penn State

The afternoon sessions at the Nobel Week Dialogue covered a lot of ground, which was inevitable if you put six extremely smart people on the stage, give them a topic, and set them loose. Although there's no way to summarize the full conversation, it's possible to pull out some important themes that the speakers returned to. I'll attempt to do that for the discussion on genetics and the environment.

One of the things that became clear at this panel (and more generally through the day) is that we may have become a bit sloppy in our thinking about heritable and environmental influences on human health and behavior. If we don't attempt to form clear hypotheses and demand evidence to support them, there's a chance that we'll end up accepting things that appeal to our personal biases.

That may sound a bit dry, but it played out in dramatic fashion across the course of the panel, in part because of the prickly presence of James Watson.

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Plants have a memory of pests that spans generations

In the age of industrial agriculture, seeds are often purchased in bulk from corporate growers that use heavy doses of pesticides. They then travel many miles to a farm where climate, soil and pest conditions are dramatically different. As a result, crops often encounter new ailments that never impacted first generation seed plants, which may have been protected from the most troublesome invaders.

This might not be the best approach, based on three studies published in the February issue of Plant Physiology. Not only does adversity in the parent generation appear to make the seed stronger, but it primes plants to fight the specific ailments that plagued their parents.

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A drug that activates only your father’s version of a gene may treat neural disorder

Anyone who's passed basic biology knows that we get one copy of a gene from our mother, a second from our father. But few people realize that not all of these genes end up being treated equally. Imprinted genes are expressed from only the maternal or paternal allele, rather than both. And, when this process goes wrong, it can actually lead to diseases. Now, researchers have identified a possible way to treat imprinting errors.

In the brain, Ube3a is an imprinted gene; only the maternal allele is expressed, even if it is mutated and the paternal allele is normal. This is the case in Angelman syndrome, a severe neurodevelopmental disorder caused by mutation or deletion of the maternal allele of Ube3a. Ube3a is imprinted only in the brain, though; in other tissues, the paternal allele is expressed along with the maternal one. 

This led Benjamin Philpot and his colleagues at UNC Chapel Hill to wonder: wouldn’t it be great if we could get the normal, paternal version of Ube3a to work in the brain—to unsilence it? Maybe this could help kids with Angelman syndrome.

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