Tuesday, March 6, 2012

And another reason to stay active...

Wow. It was recently discovered that exercise changes gene expression in muscles:

http://www.nature.com/news/a-trip-to-the-gym-alters-dna-1.10176

Summary is that the more we exercise, the more metabolism-boosting genes get expressed.

It's just remarkable how we keep finding more evidence of how our environment and behavior can alter something as fundamental as our DNA.  In some cases those changes can actually be passed to offspring!  I'm talking about epigenetic inheritance, or the phenomenon of inheriting gene expression patterns that are defined beyond the the actual sequence of the DNA.  Bear with me while I attempt to explain this for my non-sciencey readers: a child inherits two copies of a single gene, lets say a gene for eye color.  One copy is from mom, the other copy from dad.  The two copies, if sequenced in a lab, have the exact same code, say for brown eye color.  So one would assume this kid would have brown eyes.  BUT for some environmental reason, dad's copy of the brown eye gene is actually turned off by epigenetic modifications.  That's a big fancy word for basically scrunching up the DNA so tightly that it never gets transcribed into RNA or translated into protein.  silent gene = no protein = no eye color from dad's gene.  So our hypothetical child might not have brown eyes (maybe hazel), even tho he/she inherited two genes for brown eyes.

Before someone blasts me for scientific inaccuracy, I know this is a gross over generalization and I honestly don't know how eye color is inherited - I just used that as an easy-to-visualize example.

But seriously - how cool is that?!??  We actually have some control over how our genes behave.  Now I just need to figure out how to turn off my chocolate-craving genes....

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