06. December 2020
Tobacco use remains one of the most important risk factors for developing serious conditions such as heart disease, lung disease, and cancer. Due to its influence on health, underwriting places significant value on identifying tobacco exposure among life insurance applicants. Accordingly, the life insurance industry widely screens for tobacco use by testing with the biomarker cotinine, a metabolite of nicotine, in an applicant’s clinical chemistry panel. The challenge with measuring cotinine...
03. December 2020
Epigenetics is an area where our scientific knowledge is rapidly increasing. One thing that scientists have discovered is that epigenetic errors are common in diseases such as cancer and in ageing cells. As a result, scientists are developing medicines that target faulty epigenomes and one of the first examples is the use of HDAC inhibitors, similar to the compound found in royal jelly. From the study of strange patterns of inheritance such as genetic imprinting, the yellow/agouti Avy mouse,...
03. December 2020
Whereas the term “genome” refers to the entire DNA sequence of an organism (three billion letters of it for humans), the epigenome refers to the entire pattern of epigenetic modifications across all genes, including methyl DNA tags, methyl histone tags, acetyl histone tags and other chemical tags that we have not mentioned, in each cell type of an organism. This represents an almost unimaginable amount of information, dwarfing even the human genome project. Nevertheless, knowledge of the...