How does epigenetics work?
In: Biology
Our genetic code is our recipie book. It tells our cooks how to make our body. We constantly have to be cooking up new parts as we are constanly needing to replace them.
Epigenetics are the factors that change the recipie – what we eat, the air we breathe, how we sleep, the amount of stress we have etc… those factors can change the way we cook our parts, and therefore change the way we work.
Epigenetics is a catch all term to describe any trait that can be passed down from parents to child, but is not encoded by your DNA or taught. One well documented example is that pregnant mothers that experience starvation conditions are more likely to have children and grandchildren that have lower body weights their entire lives.
There are a few processes scientists have uncovered that can control traits like this. Most of them essentially make your DNA more/less accessible/readable by the machinery in your cells to eventually be made into proteins. It’s like opening a book to a certain page and displaying it versus locking it away in an obscure part of the library. This helps your cells turn genes on or off and can control a great many things.
Latest Answers