06. December 2020
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...
03. December 2020
So far we have described some specific cases of epigenetic regulation, but we now know that epigenetics in its broad sense, (how genes are expressed and used, rather than the DNA sequence of the genes themselves) is central to how a fertilised egg can eventually give rise to a whole organism and how cells of, let’s say your skin, remain skin cells and are different from your brain cells, despite containing exactly the same genes. Shortly after fertilisation, a developing human embryo consists...