I have been following studies from this lab because I think it is just so interesting (especially if you consider it from a larger picture: any stressor including wars...). This commentary came out in Science recently: Although such methyl tags are known to pass down generations in plants and some other organisms, biologists didn’t think this happened very often in mammals. That’s because in the formation of sperm and eggs and in early embryos, cells go through a reprogramming stage believed to wipe away most methylation marks, except on a few genes crucial to early development. But the results from Skinner’s team suggested that methylation marks on additional genes escape this reprogramming, even in generations that had no direct exposure to the toxin… Without altering the sequence of DNA,certain chemicals can cause harmful health effects that pass down generations. Toxicologists are so outraged that they have tried to block his funding, he says. Geneticists resist having their decades-old understanding of inheritance overturned. Then there are the evolutionary biologists, who have “the biggest knee-jerk reaction of all.” Skepticism is to be expected, Skinner acknowledges: “This is probably going to be the biggest paradigm shift in science in recent history,” he declares. Skinner is a polarizing figure in an already contentious area of biology—transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, or the notion that nonmutational changes to an individual’s DNA, such as chemical coatings that alter a gene’s activity, can persist in their great-grandchildren and beyond. I cant upload the paper, but heres the link. sciencemag.org/content/343/6169/361.summary?rss=1
Posted on: Sat, 25 Jan 2014 11:12:14 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015