Epigenetics

It had to happen: Someone making epigenetics stand in for the selfish gene, an all-purpose gene-splain: If epigenetic research utilizing these new technologies will successfully shed some light in disease prevention, diagnosis, and therapy, then the research can expand to study epigenetics related to human behavior and moods. Aggression, violence, adultery, sexual preferences, risk-taking, happiness, depression, and even spirituality may all be affected by gene regulation, including epigenetics, via mechanisms not yet precisely defined. There also is much evidence that diet, sleep, fasting, exercise, and stress regulate gene expression but here, too, the way they do it needs to be explored. Incorporating these new epigenetic technologies when examining the multiple biological factors that regulate gene expression will better illuminate whether Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: For many years, it was thought that sperm do not retain any histone packaging and therefore could not transmit histone-based epigenetic information to offspring. Recent studies, however, have shown that about 10 percent of histone packaging is retained in both human and mouse sperm. “Furthermore, where the chromosomes retain histone packaging of DNA is in developmentally important regions, so those findings raised awareness of the possibility that sperm may transmit important epigenetic information to embryos,” Strome said. When her lab looked at C. elegans sperm, they found the sperm genome fully retains histone packaging. Other researchers had found the same is true for another commonly studied organism, the zebrafish. “Like zebrafish, worms represent an extreme form of histone Read More ›

In a study of mice forced to inhale large doses of nicotine carried large epigenetics signatures that affected their offspring: The result might explain why the experiments also found the male mice’s offspring—and grandoffspring—exhibited abnormal behavior and learning impairments. “Until now, much attention had been focused on the effects of maternal nicotine exposure on their children,” Florida State University’s Pradeep Bhide, who led the study, tells The Boston Globe in an email. “Not much had been known about the effects of paternal smoking on their children and grandchildren. Our study shows that paternal nicotine exposure can be deleterious for the offspring in multiple generations.” Kerry Grens, “Nicotine’s Effects Passed On Through Generations of Mice” at The Scientist Paper. (open access) Read More ›

Remember old-fashioned, unalterable DNA? It was interesting stuff. So now this: “A study of chemical tags on histone proteins hints at how the same genome can yield very different animals:” The bee genome has a superpower. Not only can the exact same DNA sequence yield three types of insect—worker, drone, and queen—that look and behave very differently, but, in the case of workers, it dictates different sets of behaviors. A key to the genome’s versatility seems to be epigenetic changes—chemical tags that, when added or removed from DNA, change the activity of a gene. Previous studies had shown distinct patterns of tags known as methyl groups on the genomes of bees performing different roles within their hives.Shawna Williams, “As Bees Specialize, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Two broad findings have been seen in memory reconsolidation, which is the retrieval and strengthening of a recent memory. The first broad finding is that, during memory reconsolidation, changes in translational control — the process of forming new proteins from activated genes — occur in areas of the brain related to memory formation. The second broad finding is that epigenetic mechanisms — various molecular modifications known to alter the activity of genes without changing their DNA sequence — are also somehow actively involved during memory reconsolidation or strengthening. Now, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have described a novel mechanism that links epigenetic change to translational control. In the Journal of Neuroscience, they report how several Read More ›

Says biologist Peter Ward, because epigenetics changes can account for life forms that have been classified as different species: More and more, biologists are discovering that organisms thought to be different species are, in fact, but one. A recent example is that the formerly accepted two species of giant North American mammoths (the Columbian mammoth and the woolly mammoth) were genetically the same but the two had phenotypes determined by environment. Epigenetics (or heritable epigenetics, or neo-Lamarckism) is a series of different processes that can cause evolutionary changes as well as dictate how organisms develop from a single fertilized egg (in the case of sexually reproducing organisms, at least) to what we look like as adults. Some say it’s just Read More ›

John Hawks is an anthropologist we’ve often noted here. In his review of palaeobiologist Peter Ward’s LaMarck’s Revenge: How Epigenetics Is Revolutionizing Our Understanding of Evolution’s Past and Present (“Epigenetics upends natural selection and genetic mutation as the sole engines of evolution, and offers startling insights into our future heritable traits.”), Hawks has this to say about epigenetics: Some scientists have hailed epigenetics as the future of biology, while others denounce it as an empty buzzword. Perhaps no other term inspires so much debate among scientists about how to define it. … But here’s the catch. When it comes to the fossil record, paleontologists have a different idea of “fast” from everyday life. Hundreds of thousands of years is plenty Read More ›

David Quammen, author of The Tangled Tree:A Radical New History of Life, a biography of Darwin skeptic Carl Woese, who discovered the Archaea, offers a long reflection at the New York Times on how biology is moving away from Darwinism: Woese was a rebel researcher, obscure but ingenious, crotchety, driven. He had his Warholian 15 minutes of fame on the front page of The Times, and then disappeared back into his lab in Urbana, scarcely touched by popular limelight throughout the remaining 35 years of his career. But he is the most important biologist of the 20th century that you’ve never heard of. He asked profound questions that few other scientists had asked. He created a method — clumsy and Read More ›

From Cassandra Willyard at Nature: Since 2000, estimates have ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. The latest attempt to plug that gap uses data from hundreds of human tissue samples and was posted on the BioRxiv preprint server on 29 May1. It includes almost 5,000 genes that haven’t previously been spotted — among them nearly 1,200 that carry instructions for making proteins. And the overall tally of more than 21,000 protein-coding genes is a substantial jump from previous estimates, which put the figure at around 20,000. But many geneticists aren’t yet convinced that all the newly proposed genes will stand up to close scrutiny. Their criticisms underscore just how difficult it is to identify new genes, or Read More ›

A reader asks about resources for non-Darwinian evolution theory and this might be a good time to recognize Peter Saunders and Mae-Wan Ho, and their lifetime study of epigenetics: Abstract: Description: Ever since Darwin, there have been challenges to the claim that the natural selection of small random variations is a sufficient explanation of evolution. Even mainstream evolutionists are now beginning to accept that something more is required. The question is whether this will be merely a few add-ons that leave the paradigm unaltered, or whether the whole framework of explanation, including its application to other disciplines, will be changed. – PT Saunders, Theor Biol Forum, 109 (1-2), 123-130 2016 Jan 1 Back in 1979, there was Ho MW, Saunders Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Exposure to early life trauma can lead to poor physical and mental health in some individuals, which can be passed on to their children. Studies in mice show that at least some of the effects of stress can be transmitted to offspring via environmentally-induced changes in sperm miRNA levels. … “The study raises the possibility that some of the vulnerability of children is due to Lamarckian type inheritance derived from their parents’ experiences,” said Larry Feig, Ph.D., professor of Developmental, Molecular and Chemical Biology at Tufts University School of Medicine and member of the Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology and Neuroscience programs at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts. Paper. (open access) – Dickson, D.A., Read More ›