In an article recently release in The New York Times author Gina Kolata sheds light on how genes that cause diseases are turned on and off. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have been working with the idea of chemical tagging. Essentially what they are doing is working with a certain kind of disease, in this cause rheumatoid arthritis and seeing what chemicals tell that gene to turn on and off. This is a field that is now up and coming which is called epigenetics. The researchers looked at 354 people with rheumatoid arthritis and 337 who did not have it, they looked at their white blood cells and chemical tags for methyl groups that could attach and turn the genes on and off. Tracking the gene was the easy part, but tracking the chemical tag was difficult because they can change under many different circumstances such as; temperature, level of activity, and even diet. The researchers were able to find 4 chemical tags that seem to correlate directly with the arthritis. Now that they have come this far they are looking for ways to regulate these chemical tags and control the arthritis.
In my opinion, the world of epigenetics is very large and this kind of work is very necessary. As a society we spend a lot of timing looking into diseases that will kill you very quickly, but not as much time on diseases that are lowering your quality of life. If we were able to take this same technique and apply it to other dabilitating diseases than we would have a much happier world. Ideally the world of epigenetics would be able to make a better tomorrow for our children so they do not have to pay for the mistakes of their parents.
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