Friday, February 20, 2015

Epigenetic's The New Frontier For The Fight Against Disease ?

An article published in Medical News Today talks about how researchers at the University School of Medicine in St. Louis have been working with epigenetic's. They talk about how every cell in the body has an identical genome and comes from the same instruction book, but what carries out the instructions from that book are different chemical markers. These chemical markers however, are not so methodical, they vary from cell to cell and vary in severity in terms of your health when disturbed. Ting Wang and other researchers at St. Louis figured out 111 of the epigenetic markers in different types of cell tissue. They have only started to scratch the surface with this type of work since epigenetic's is a very new and up coming idea. Ting Wang says there are only 20 other articles in publication like that of his. Which is very little compared to other more researched topics. Wang and his team also made a browser called WashU that allows for faster browsing through massive amounts of genetic and molecular data which has made it much easier on many researchers. Another, interesting thing that one of Wang's researchers was working on is the methylation of certain genes to turn on and off certain expressions. She found over 18,000 regions of the human genome that respond to methylation and this could be a huge break through in diseases like cancer.


This article was very interesting because epigenetics is such a new topic in the world of genetics and has been strongly fought against in the past. Epigenetics is especially interesting to me because I am very interested in Holistic health and it is wonderful to see that modern medicine is finally starting to look at the body as a whole and understanding that what you do today can greatly affect what you do tomorrow. The methylation of certain genes is also very interesting because if we could turn certain genes on and off it would change a lot in the world. We could stop devastating things like cancer and insignificant things that affect a lot of people like hair loss.

Primary Article
Secondary Article

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