Epigenetics

[Jenemesis]

I know of many instances which relate, however, somethings are too unpleasant to elaborate on....
just as bad emotions manifest in the body, so do good ones!!!

I know that when I am elated then my health is at it's best.

Proverbs: "a cheerful heart maketh good medicine but bitterness dries the bones"

 

[Techne]

Deep Genomics: In the Case of DNA, the Package Can Be as Important as Its Contents, New Work With Fruit Flies Reveals

ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2011) — In 2003, the year a complete draft of the human genome was released, the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute launched the ENCODE project (ENCyclopedia of DNA Elements), to develop an encyclopedia of the epigenome, that is, of all of the many factors that can change the expression of the genes without changing the genes

...What is the epigenome?

Instead of spewing out long strings of the As, Ts, Gs and Cs like the gene sequencing labs, the epigenetic labs are disgorging voluminous data about the proteins bound to the DNA and the many other gizmos and widgets that make up the machinery of gene expression.

These widgets are collectively called the epigenome, because they provide a level of control in addition to, or beyond, the level provided by the genome. Whereas the genome is the same in every cell of an organism, the epigenome of every cell type is different. It is because of the epigenome that a liver cell is not a brain cell is not a bone cell.

By 2007, ENCODE had analyzed the epigenetics of about one percent of the human genome and published the results in Nature and a special issue of Genome Research.

To speed things up, the National Institutes of Health funded modENCODE to work out the epigenetics of the fruit fly and the round worm C. elegans.

Both organisms, which have much smaller genomes, will provide reference points for the more intimidating project of unraveling the much larger human epigenetic system. They also provide a quick and relatively easy way of verifying hypotheses arising out of the ENCODE data.

The first results from the modENCODE projects, which were divided among 11 teams, have just been published in Science and Nature. Many more papers are forthcoming.

Led by Gary Karpen of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and the University of California at Berkeley, the modENCODE chromatin group includes teams led by Washington University's Elgin, Mitzi Kuroda of Harvard Medical School, Peter Park of Harvard Medical School and Vince Pirrotta of Rutgers University. Elgin's team is made up of Nicole C. Riddle, PhD, research assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences; Tingting Gu, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate in biology; Sarah Gadel and Sarah Marchetti, lab technicians.

Karpen's team has just published a comprehensive description of the chromatin landscape of the fruit fly genome in Nature, which provides a representative example of the science coming from the larger undertaking...

Read the full article, fascinating stuff .