Your Genome Could Even Be Changing While You Read This
Researchers at Johns Hopkins say that epigenetic marks on DNA - chemical marks other than the DNA sequence - do indeed change over a person's lifetime, and that the degree of change is similar among family members. The team suggests that overall genome health is heritable and that epigenetic changes occurring over one's lifetime may explain why disease susceptibility increases with age, they say in their article in the June 25 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. If epigenetics does contribute to such diseases through interaction with environment or aging, says Andrew P. Feinberg, M.D., M.P.H, a professor of molecular biology and genetics and director of the Epigenetics Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, a person's epigenetic marks would change over time. So his team embarked on an international collaboration to see if that was true. They focused on methylation-one particular type of epigenetic mark, where chemical methyl groups are attached to DNA. Read More...
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