Biology News :)

In my AP Biology class, we talk about news articles concerning biology a lot. Sometimes they're relatively new, and sometimes they are a couple years old. I thought I'd share a few of them with you and offer some of my views on them :) I'm sorry that I can't directly link you to the article, but I'll give you the information to look it up on your own and a summary of it.

From One Genome, Many Types of Cells. But How?

Nicholas Wade

The New York Times

February 23, 2009

            This article discussed the potential epigenomes present on the advancement of medical technology. Ever since the human genome was decoded in 2003, scientists are focused on the epigenome, which is the second layer of information in proteins that controls access to genes in DNA. The article compares the different types of cells in that body to a play. Each cell uses the same script, the genome, but they are assigned a different part by the epigenome. Each cell knows what part it plays by the chemical modifications it has which act as marks on the lengths of the chromatin. This article discusses the possibilities of epigenomes helping with regenerative medicine and reversing effects of aging and cancer. It says that you can possibly change the function of a cell by inserting chromatin regulators into it and reverting the cell back to an embryonic state.  A chromatin regulator is a protein machine that reads the marks on a chromosome tail and either bundles up parts the DNA so it isn’t used or makes a certain part of DNA more accessible so the cell can specialize in one type of work. Even though it is still very experimental, if you change a cell back to embryonic state, then you can make them into certain cells that might have been lost to disease. You can also create drugs to alter epigenomes to treat a disease. If you take a drug that causes a mutation in the epigenome, you can stop the creation of certain bad cells such as cancer. Many scientists believe that the research on the epigenome should be expanded into a more organized and better funded effort.

            This article is meant to inform the public on what scientists have been up to lately. It gives good news to the public and gives some people hope for possible cures for certain diseases. It explains to normal people how certain processes in our body work and tells us of the prospect of the ability to manipulate those processes to make ourselves healthier. This information is very important to scientists, but not really to the public yet. It states that there is still a lot of research to do so we can expect that it will be a long time until everyday people will be concerned with how our epigenomes are responding to drugs or related things. It is important that this article was written because it gives people an idea of the future, but so far, it isn’t a topic that people should be deeply concerned about or really excited for. The medical advances these scientists are exploring won’t be converted into everyday rituals such as taking vitamins or medications any time soon. 

            I would recommend this article to anyone interested in things such as regenerative medicine. It’s a pretty okay read, but it would probably help to have a bit of background information of epigenomes or just genetics in general before you read this. I don’t have very much knowledge of genetics and so this article was a bit muddy for me, but I was able to get the main idea of it. It is still a little unclear to me what exactly an epigenome is, but I guess this is alright because scientists don’t even know everything about it either and are still researching it. This article was a very interesting and I learned new things about genetics and epigenomes from it.