Re: Article: Does Environment Influence Genes? Researcher Gives Hard Thoughts On Soft Inheritance

Methylation of DNA not only effects phenotypes and is passed on from
generation to generation, but will have different bindings depending on
the tissue which it is measured. IE, lymphocytes will have a different
pattern of methylation than red blood cells, which have all the genes,
except those coding for hemoglobin, supressed filling the
entire cell with hemoglobin. There are specific protein complexes
which bind transfer methylation from one copy of DNA to another
(methylation transferases), and there are other complexes which alter
the methylation pattern of DNA. There is a movement to sequence the
"epigenome".

The evolutionary aspects of these findings have not been worked out
completely, but it is a working hypothesis that methylation is in part
responsible for tissue differentiation and specialization, and as a
consequence will be more prevalent in organisms with a large variety of
highly specialized cells. This is important for the study of cancer,
because tumors are a group of cells which have been improperly
differentiated, and continue to reproduce and/or not die...

-Robin


.

Relevant Pages

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