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Subject: Genes
Replies: 82 Views: 1795

shadow27 21.03.17 - 02:11am
New research is revealing how your environment actually changes your genetics - and its putting you in the drivers seat.

In November, the Childrens Hospital Oakland Research Institute released the results of their groundbreaking study. They found that a mothers diet during pregnancy not only affects her child, but also her childs offspring.

This means that the lifestyle choices a woman makes can affect several generations of children - a revolutionary idea that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. * +

shadow27 21.03.17 - 02:12am
For more than 150 years - since the time of Darwin - scientists have believed that any changes to an organism cannot be passed on to the next generation. According to strict Darwinism, if you were to change your diet, lose weight, and become super-fit, your children would not benefit from your efforts. But we now know there is something more at play: the ''epigenome.'' The epigenome plays a powerful role in your health and could make the difference between whether or not you inherit heart disease or diabetes or something else.

Scientists in an emerging field of research - epigenetics - have discovered that your genes are only 15 percent of the total genetic material you get from your parents. For example, your genes give you many individualizing traits like blue eyes or brown hair. The remaining 85 percent - the epigenome - is a scaffolding of proteins that surround your DNAs double-helix pattern.

As it turns out, this ''scaffolding'' functions as an interface that interacts with your environment. Based on the lifestyle choices you make, the epigenome has the power to turn genes on or off, changing the way your body translates your genetic coding into the proteins that make up YOU * +

shadow27 21.03.17 - 02:15am
(Long story short, there was a study)

The first group of mice received a standard diet. The second group received the same diet, with the added benefit of supplemental vitamin B12, folate, choline, and zinc. When the babies were born, the females from both groups were mated and fed identical diets with no supplements. When the offspring gave birth, Dr. Martins team discovered that the original mice that had the diet with extra vitamins passed the benefits on to both their children and grandchildren.

Findings like these have powerful implications in both directions. It means that, by making healthy choices, your efforts can have a positive effect not only on your children but on your grandchildren as well. On the other hand, a diet of fast food and sodas will not only wreck your own health, it could predispose future generations to chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

That helps to explain why so many schoolchildren suffer from high blood pressure and low HDL (good cholesterol). The poor dietary choices their parents made are coming home to roost. * +

shadow27 21.03.17 - 02:16am
This discovery gives us new insight into a long-standing debate between Charles Darwin and a guy you may never have heard of - French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

Darwins theory, which has been shaping the direction of modern science, can be summed up in a few words: Genes cannot be affected by the outside world. In other words, your lifestyle choices have no effect on your genetic code or how those genes are expressed.

But Lamarck believed that if an organism changes during its life in order to adapt to its environment, those changes would be passed on to its offspring and Dr. Martins study is one of several that are proving he was correct.

So, guess what? It looks like youre no longer a ''victim'' of your genetic programming. If, for example, if you decide to exercise vigorously to develop new muscle, it now appears that its possible for you to pass on a predisposition to build muscle with exercise to your children and perhaps even further down your line of descendants.

Conscious decisions to improve your health will interact with your epigenome. In turn, the proteins in your epigenome can turn off genes that would have otherwise expressed themselves as disease in your descendents. * +

shadow27 21.03.17 - 02:18am
Instead of the old model, think of your genetic code as a library. You have thousands of choices, but you never check out all of the books. The epigenome interacts with your environment and your choices to determine which books to ''read''

You can actually ''talk'' to your genes to improve your health and prevent disease.


- This makes so much sense to me, it explains how organisms interact with their environment a lot better than the Darwinian model ever did. * +

ogdenz 21.03.17 - 02:44am
No real shock or surprise here as all things affect all other things. To be fair though I only read the topic title. * +

shadow27 21.03.17 - 02:44am
That eye topic got me thinking about virus triggered evolution/gene therapy etc how to rewrite your genetic code and I got sidetracked. Anyway..

With a few easy tweaks, scientists can cut-and-paste DNA inside living cells, thanks to a promising new technique that could make possible everything from testing new drugs or curing genetic diseases.

And researchers just discovered a way to make the process a whole lot cheaper and easier, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Developmental Cell.

For less than US100, the new process allows scientists to make some of the key materials needed to modify an organisms entire genome, or its complete set of DNA, the researchers said.

The advance is based on a technique that allows scientists to narrow in on a specific gene and cut-and-paste bits of DNA to change its function, known as CRISPR-Cas9. Jennifer Doudna at UC Berkeley and her colleagues first discovered this natural process that bacteria use to protect themselves against invading viruses.

But the technique is much more powerful than that - it basically gives scientists the ability to rewrite specific chunks of an organisms genetic code, including that of humans. * +

shadow27 21.03.17 - 02:46am
Heres how it works: When a bacterium encounters DNA from a virus, it makes a strand of RNA, a molecular cousin to DNA, that matches the sequence of the viral DNA, known as a guide RNA. The guide RNA latches onto a protein (the Cas9 part of the CRISPR-Cas9 name), and together they search for the matching virus. When they find a match, the protein, which acts like a pair of scissors, cuts up the viral DNA, destroying it.

The same process can be used to cut-and-paste DNA into virtually any type of living cell. For example, instead of using the protein scissors to cut a virus, they can be used to cut out DNA in a human cell and replace it with DNA of the scientists choosing.

In this way, it would be possible to swap out a defective version of a gene for a healthy one.

Humans have roughly 20,000 to 25,000 genes, which encode proteins that perform vital jobs in our cells. But our genetic blueprint has a lot of other DNA whose purpose is less obvious. The successor to the human genome project, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), has identified what 80 percent of our complete set of DNA does, but the rest remains a mystery. * +

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