The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance

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For the lay reader like myself, that's a little too much information, and I would have liked a shorter, slightly dumbed-down version. I love birdwatching (no, I don't have a life-list), cycling, scavenging stuff from skips, and growing vegetables. Although I found the scientific concepts in this book quite hard at times, Carey uses great metaphors to help aid understanding, and I was amazed at how much I could get considering I had never heard of epigenetics prior to reading it, and even my genetics knowledge had been very basic.

The Epigenetics Revolution traces the thrilling path this discipline has taken over the last twenty years. Interactions between individuals of the same or different species also are epigenetic, as seen in adjustment of the number of soldiers in an ant colony in response to depletion of soldier numbers and to hormonal cues, or in the interactions between predator and prey species in the plankton where diffusible chemicals from the predator elicit the formation of features in the prey not seen in the absence of the predator. Chapter 6 by Gorelick, et al, presents what is, in some ways, a hybrid perspective between molecular biology and the older (classic? Nessa Carey is a visiting professor at Imperial College in London and currently works in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, where she has specialized in epigenetics for nearly a decade. Otherwise, we will continue to document correlations between variation in gene function and expression with phenotypic variation without a deeper understanding of how phenotypic variation is generated.Knowing how parts of it are dialled up or down depending on where in the body the cell finds itself and where the body itself happens to be in the wider environment is quite another. Despite these relatively minor criticisms, “The Epigenetics Revolution” is an excellent scientific biography that charts the past, present, and optimistic future of the field.

La descrizione dei processi dinamici che regolano la utilizzazione delle informazioni del DNA è fantastica. But this book, subtitled: "How modern biology is rewriting our understanding of genetics, disease and inheritance", is an attempt to put matters straight. Each cell in your body carries exactly the same genetic code, and yet you don’t have teeth growing out of your eyeballs and you never get toenails coming out of your liver. g. it is suggested that techniques for assessing DNA methylation mistake 5 hydroxymethylated for unmethylated DNA, whereas the misreading is to classify both 5-hydroxymethylcytosine and 5-methylcytosine as methylated 7) are at a level of technicality that means the primary literature would need to be read before any use could be made of the concepts. The sex of a crocodile or an alligator depends on the temperature during critical stages in the development of the egg - the same blueprint can be used to create either a male or a female croc.

Since all phenotypic variation has a physical basis, we can define epigenetics at the molecular level as the set of modifications to our genetic material that change the ways of gene expression - switch on, switch off, or some intermediate stage - but which does not alter our genome which we can transmit in all its purity to our descendants. For Waddington, genetic assimilation was one the main ways in which epigenetic mechanisms were relevant to evolutionary change. All too often the child grows up into an adult at high risk of depression, self harm, alcohol and drug abuse, and suicide. The phrasing “revolution” is a dramatic use of English that effectively portrays a momentous shift in biological thinking. It seemed it was only a matter of time until we had all the answers to the secrets of life on this planet.

Epigenetics is what happens when genes are actually in action: in the growth of the foetus, in responding to hormones and environmental stress, to learning, to maturation at puberty. We have similarly come to the realization that the complexity of living organisms scales much better with the percentage that does not code for proteins than it does with the number of base pairs coding for proteins. The cutting-edge of biology, however, is telling us that we still don’t even know all of the questions. In the factory, molten metal or plastic gets poured into the mould thousands of times and, unless something goes wrong in the process, out pop thousands of identical car parts. While the medical terminology is there, the concepts and information were presented in a fun and easy to understand manner.Such wandering isn't necessarily the best idea in academia but the breadth of experience is really valued in industry. The effects of the famine on the birth weights of children who had been in the womb during that terrible period were: if a mother was well-fed around the time of conception and malnourished only for the last few months few months of the pregnancy, her baby was likely to be small. One particularly excellent chapter explains epigenetic change through the body of steroid-addled baseball player José Canseco, from his brain to his testicles. It isn't, but I confidently predicted to anyone within earshot that this would finally set tongues wagging. The cell tells the DNA what to do just as much as the DNA instructs the cell: you can't have one without the other.