Release date: 2018-04-11
In a review published in the New England Journal of Medicine on April 5, scientist Andrew Feinberg, MD, called for more integration between the two areas of DNA research—genetics and epigenetics. . Feinberg is the head of the Institute of Basic Biomedical Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, and Professor of the German King of Medicine, Oncology, Molecular Biology and Genetics.
Perhaps many people still remember the news of "the astronauts' space for one year and the genetic change of 7%" reported by some media in March. These news said that NASA's astronaut Scott? After a year of living on the International Space Station, Scott Kelly returned to Earth and found that his genetics changed by 7%. This is a typical error report. In fact, what is changed is not the gene, but the way the gene is expressed, which is the epigenetics we are going to introduce today.
It is worth mentioning that Dr. Andrew Feinberg, author of the NEJM review, happened to be involved in this astronaut epigenetic study.
Most people are familiar with genetics, a field of research that focuses on the precise sequence of chemicals that make up the DNA ladder. However, epigenetics is not well known to the public. Dr. Feinberg pointed out that epigenetics studies how information is added to genes or how it affects gene readout; but in the understanding of human diseases, this field is often insufficiently integrated with genetic research.
Dr. Feinberg, who leads the Center for Epigenetics at the Johns Hopkins University's Institute of Basic Biomedical Sciences, said that research in the field of epigenetics can detect changes in the genome after environmental exposure, which is impossible by DNA sequencing itself.
“We tend to think that our genome is static, but it is not. Most diseases are affected by changes in certain factors in the environment and our different exposures to the environment,†Dr. Feinberg said. “Only detecting gene sequences and Can't tell us everything about this exposure."
When a small chemical group attaches to the ladder structure of DNA, an epigenetic change occurs in the genome. This chemical marker does not change the DNA coding itself. They change the way genes are turned on and off. Similarly, other epigenetic changes occur in the way DNA and proteins are compressed in the nucleus. If they are compressed very tightly, the openness of the DNA will be reduced for structures that "read" the gene encoding and produce the protein.
Dr. Feinberg writes that epigenetic changes are found in the lungs of smokers and in umbilical cord blood of infants who have been exposed to smoke before birth. He also pointed out that epidemiological studies have shown that there is a correlation between famine in Sweden, Germany and China and the shortened life span of offspring and schizophrenia, as well as nutritional deficiencies in mice and human studies, which indicate epigenetic Learning changes can occur early in life and can be inherited.
In addition, he pointed out that the modern revolution in gene sequencing has found many mutations in cancer that control epigenetic factors.
He believes that many diseases, including autoimmune diseases, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, can benefit from a combination of epigenetic and genetic studies. "Epigenetics is at the junction of genomic, developmental, and environmental exposures," he wrote.
He suggested combining genome-wide and full epigenome association studies to overcome the problems of causal determination of specific changes in these two separate studies.
Dr. Feinberg also believes that combining epigenetics with genetics is expected to identify high-risk groups of the disease and monitor the effects of treatment.
He also said that scientists know very little about how existing drugs alter the patient's epigenome. He said that such new discoveries will depend on collaboration between pharmacologists and computer and physical biologists.
Source: Health New Vision (Micro Signal HealthHorizon)
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