• Question: Is there anything else that affects our genetics?

    Asked by on 3 Jan 2019. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Gemma Chandratillake

      Gemma Chandratillake answered on 3 Jan 2019:

      Yep – the genome can be “epigenetically” modified, which means that the chemical modifications can be made to the DNA or the proteins that package it that affect whether certain genes are turned on or off. Epigenetic modification is the interface of the genome with the environment and is a really hot area of biology at the moment!

    • Photo: Emma Meaburn

      Emma Meaburn answered on 9 Jan 2019:

      In short, yes. We each share a set of genetic instructions that are similar enough to build – from scratch – a highly complex organism that is characteristically human. Yet we differ in important and meaningful ways, including at the genetic level; if you were to pick any two individuals at random and examine their DNA sequence you would find that they differ at roughly 1 in every 1,200 – 1,500 DNA bases (or ‘letters’). Given that the human genome is 3 billion DNA basepairs in length, this represents a substantial amount of genetic variability. A great deal of progress has been made in identifying specific DNA variants that influence our risk for disease (or indeed influence behaviours, weight and height) but despite these advances we often don’t know how the genes actually work – what is the mechanism? **This is partly because the effects of our genes are context dependant*MATOMO_URL That is, how our genes work, when they are expressed, and at what level depends on other biological and environmental factors. As Gemma states, there is a lot of interest in understanding how the information contained in our DNA is accessed and regulated as we develop, and we can do this by studying epigenetic marks (such as DNA methylation) and gene expression.

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