The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance

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Carey, Nessa (19 February 2015). "The epigenomics roadmap: more exciting than the Genome Project?". BBC World Service Radio . Retrieved 27 January 2017. Similarly, we argue that epigenomic profiles, in their expanding variety, provide the new place holders to anchor the environment to the genome and enable the attending analogic–digital translations, conceptually as much as experimentally.

The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting

E. H.: In most mammals, including humans, the choice of the X chromosome to be inactivated is totally random from one cell to another during development. This means that females are a real mosaic for the expression of X genes. In each tissue (brain, blood, kidneys, etc.) the proportion of cells that activate the paternal X rather than the maternal X may differ, and this also varies from one individual to another. Even monozygotic twins (from the same egg) are not identical in this respect. More than your average popular science book, there is a commendable depth of explanation and a wealth of scientific terminology to be found here. While the latter may be off-putting to some, Carey's adept use of metaphor provides clarity throughout. Within a few years ambitious large-scale projects, such as the International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC) or the NIH Roadmap Epigenomics Mapping Consortium, aiming at mapping human epigenomes for a variety of cell types and/or disease states, have been launched worldwide. New journals ( Epigenetics, Epigenetics and Chromatin, Clinical Epigenetics), professional bodies (the Epigenetic Society, the Clinical Epigenetics Society) and research centers have also appeared in just a decade. In sum, epigenetics has provided “a banner under which a new scientific movement has advanced” ( Haig, 2012, p. 15). Even beyond the boundaries of biomedicine, various other disciplines have started to signal the impact of epigenetics on some of their fundamental tenets: from bioethics ( Dupras et al, 2012) to human geography ( Guthman and Mansfield, 2013), from political ( Hedlund, 2012) to legal theory ( Rothstein et al, 2009), from epidemiology ( Relton and Davey Smith, 2012) to the philosophy of identity ( Boniolo and Testa, 2011). We’ll learn how the genetic code inside your cells gets turned on and off, what causes the changes, and how they happen despite your DNA remaining unchanged.Anyone seriously interested in who we are and how we function should read this book. Peter Forbes, The Guardian Pulling together the threads of these imbricated, blurred or at times frankly competing understandings of epigenetics, we can thus posit that its current and unifying thrust is, in a nutshell, the promise to capture the analogical vastness of the‘ environmental signals' recounted above through the digital representation of their molecular responses. If what seemed irreducibly analogic (the social, the environmental, the biographical, the idiosyncratically human) needs to be overlaid onto the digital genome of the informationally ripe age in a dyadic flow of reciprocal reactivity, then it seems that this overlay can succeed only once the analogic is interrogated, parsed and cast into genome-friendly, code-compatible digital representations (RNA, DNA found associated to specific chromatin modifications as in chromatin immunoprecipitation or ChIP, methylated DNAs etc.). In this respect, epigenomic profiles (transcriptomes, chromatin maps and the further bits of living matter that technology is progressively digitizing, from proteomes to metabolomes etc.) are increasingly fulfilling, in today's biology, the role that cellular lineages took on in what Morange refers to as the ‘crisis of molecular biology' in the 1970s and 1980s. Following the spectacular dissection of the genetic code, the challenge to explain development in equally molecular and code-compatible terms proved rapidly a major one. As Morange notes,

The Epigenetics Revolution by Nessa Carey – review

Carey] provides an excellent and largely accurate account of a fascinating and fast-moving area of modern biology. Jonathan Hodgkin, Times Literary Supplement Nessa Carey takes us on a lively and up-to-date tour of what's known about epigenetic mechanisms and their implications for ageing and cancer. Laurence Hurst, University of Bath, Focus Magazine This is a real personal statement written by a student for their university application. It might help you decide what to include in your own. There are lots more examples in our collection of sample personal statements. Professor Nessa Carey – Speakers for Schools". www.speakers4schools.org . Retrieved 13 February 2017.Carey, Nessa, ed. (2016). Epigenetics for Drug Discovery. The Royal Society of Chemistry. doi: 10.1039/9781782628484. ISBN 9781849738828. Moran, Laurence A. (10 February 2015). "Sandwalk: Nessa Carey and New Scientist don't understand the junk DNA debate". Sandwalk . Retrieved 28 January 2017.