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

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Generation X is a very interesting chapter that explains the history of sex determination; an epigenetic process that depends upon tight regulation of X chromosome genes, termed “X chromosome dosage compensation. This book provides an excellent introduction to a fascinating new field that may revolutionize our understanding of human health and disease. After all, in cloning, if you suck out the nucleus of a cell and replace it with the nucleus of a completely different kind of creature, it will grow into an adult dictated by the new, injected nuclear DNA. One particularly excellent chapter explains epigenetic change through the body of steroid-addled baseball player José Canseco, from his brain to his testicles.

That something else must be going on in addition to the instructions contained in the genetic code is clear from the following simple fact. Limiting the definition in this way, they retain a Waddingtonian view of the importance of mechanisms acting above the gene level and apply it to the evolution of asexual taxa. The term epigenetics has increased in use in the molecular, evolutionary and developmental literature in recent years.

These include epigenetic inheritance, of course, but also emergent phenomena such as self-organization and variational properties of development (e. But although we are living through the greatest discoveries about the processes of life generally, and human beings in particular, the new findings hardly rate a blip on the collective consciousness. g. the agouti mouse experiments, the classic Dutch famine and its correlation with obesity, the royal jelly etc. 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.

And so Shelley and I caught a flight to Arizona to see Jürgen Liebig, the ant biologist, in his lab. This is a much more sensible metaphor, but then on the same page she refers to "the DNA blueprint" as if she hadn't read what she had just written. It defines an area of study and a level of processes that creates a coherent understanding of the emergent (?It is a challenging, but really interesting read, and perhaps, as it did for me, it will change the way you think about biology! McEachern and Lloyd [bh2]make the case that molecular epigenetic processes are amazingly conserved across metazoan phyla. The phrasing “revolution” is a dramatic use of English that effectively portrays a momentous shift in biological thinking. 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. However, they are functionally indeterminate in the sense that their complexity prevents us in most cases from creating frameworks that predict phenotypic outcomes directly from DNA sequences or sequence variation.