恐るべき epigenetics
スウェーデンの極北地域において、親世代の食生活が子や孫の世代の寿命に影響するという研究結果があるそうです。また、父親が11歳より前に喫煙しだすと、子どものBMIが極端に上昇するとか。遺伝といえばDNA、感嘆には変わらないと考えられてきましたが、環境ストレスに短期間で対応するために epigeneticsが機能している可能性が高くなってきました。上の記事の「DNA＝ハード、epigenome＝ソフト」という例えが分かりやすいのでメモ。
More recently, however, researchers have begun to realize that epigenetics could also help explain certain scientific mysteries that traditional genetics never could: for instance, why one member of a pair of identical twins can develop bipolar disorder or asthma even though the other is fine. Or why autism strikes boys four times as often as girls. Or why extreme changes in diet over a short period in Norrbotten could lead to extreme changes in longevity. In these cases, the genes may be the same, but their patterns of expression have clearly been tweaked.Biologists offer this analogy as an explanation: if the genome is the hardware, then the epigenome is the software. "I can load Windows, if I want, on my Mac," says Joseph Ecker, a Salk Institute biologist and leading epigenetic scientist. "You're going to have the same chip in there, the same genome, but different software. And the outcome is a different cell type."
