Author Archives: Chris Womack

Did Epigenetics Make Us Smart?

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Chris Womack

Finally there’s research comparing the epigenetic marks of human brain neurons to those of other primates, and it’s found real differences that make us function in a unique way. Do these epigenetic modifications help give us the brainpower for reflection, sentience, sapience, consciousness, and so forth? I’m not a gambler, but since primate neuron-specific genes don’t show a whole lot of difference from one another in their protein-coding sequences, that’s where I’d put my money. If I really had to. With only one study to look at so far, this line of inquiry is in its infancy, to be sure. No one else has looked at the epigenetic component of human brain evolution. Hennady Shulha, Jessica Crisci, and Schahram Akbarian at the University … Continue reading →

Posted in Applications, Chromatin Structure, Chromosome conformation capture, Conformation Capture, Divergent Transcription, Evolutionary Epigenetics, Gene Regulation, Histone Modifications, Neuroscience | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Epigenetics and Fat — Not Just Girth

Posted on November 20, 2012 by Chris Womack

In honor of the U.S. national day of gustatory indulgence, I thought I’d write about girth and fat. EpiExperts Twitter friend Graham Burdge and colleagues at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom just published an interesting paper exploring how the fat content of a mother rat’s diet affects the polyunsaturated fats in her offspring’s cells and plasma, as well as how that diet may accomplish that feat — apparently it involves promoter methylation of the gene Fads 2. But first, girth. My co-blogger Nicole recently tweeted a blog post from U.S. National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, who shared a map by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control showing how obesity has swept the country since 1985. It’s bracing, … Continue reading →

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Canada Joins the International Human Epigenome Consortium – Q&A with Tomi Pastinen of Génome Québec

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Chris Womack

In an ambitious project investigating the interplay of environment, disease, and epigenetics, Canada is funneling $41 million into epigenomics research. It’s a multi-pronged effort to scrutinize a variety of tissue samples, disease states, and responses to environmental insults, so I called up Tomi Pastinen, the Canada research chair in human genetics, to learn more about the project. Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. But first, more about the project itself. It’s Canada’s entrée into the International Human Epigenome Consortium, and its announcement last week follows closely on the heels of last year’s launch of a European IHEC effort, BLUEPRINT (see our interview with the project’s Henk Stunnenberg here). While BLUEPRINT focused on blood epigenomes, which is common in … Continue reading →

Posted in Animal Models, Applications, DNA Methylation, Epigenome, Gene Regulation, Genomewide Methylation Profiling, Histone Modifications, Metabolism, Neuroscience, Next Gen Sequencing, Sodium Bisulfite Sequencing, Transcriptome | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Epigenetics of Real-Life Stress and Serotonin

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Chris Womack

Sure, M.D.s often suffer a lot of pressure. But as I learned in a brief hospital job, nurses really bear the brunt of all the biological clean-up, red tape, weird hours, patient complaints, and snippy doctors’ demands. So this new study in PLoS One on stress-related epigenetic changes in shift-working female nurses really caught my attention, and seemed like a good followup that post on situational stress and epigenetics. Nurses under high stress appear to have their gene expression epigenetically regulated in a way that may decrease serotonin in the brain’s synapses. It seems a bit like the reverse of Prozac, and it bears a passing resemblance to what might happen at the beginning of depression. By interfering with serotonin … Continue reading →

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Does Epigenetics Prove Lamarck Right?

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Chris Womack

It seems like every article about epigenetics in the popular press includes a sentence about how maybe, just maybe this new finding or other proves that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was right some 200 years ago. He famously tied “acquired traits” — characteristics an individual accumulates during its life, such as muscular arms — into a broader theory of how species evolve. The most recent version I’ve seen is in the Sept 8 New York Times opinion piece “Why Fathers Really Matter,” though it’s indirect and noncommittal, as Lamarck comparisons tend to be: Epigenetics proves that we are the products of history, public as well as private, in parts of us that are so intimately ours that few people ever imagined that … Continue reading →

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Situational Stress Makes Short-Term Epigenetic Changes

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Chris Womack

Or so it appears, based on research by Gunther Meinlschmidt and colleagues. When they exposed 76 people to a stressful simulated social situation, they found changes in the methylation of two genes within an hour. What’s more, those two genes—oxytocin receptor (OXTR) and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)—are important to human behavior. The oxytocin receptor conveys the hormone oxytocin’s effect at several sites in the body, including the brain. BDNF supports existing neurons, encourages their growth, and functions in memory and learning. The case isn’t perfectly conclusive yet, of course—with 76 subjects between 61 and 67 years old, the study could be larger. And the team measured gene methylation in blood samples—and not brain samples, of course—so it’s not clear that … Continue reading →

Posted in Behavioral Epigenetics, DNA Methylation | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Epigenetics of Smoking During Pregnancy

Posted on August 10, 2012 by Chris Womack

Looking at around 474,000 CpG sites in cord blood from 1,062 newborns, a multi-institutional group of researchers took the first broad look at what happens epigenetically when pregnant moms smoke. Typical of epigenome scans, this one doesn’t make any clear links between methylation states and any diseases, though the researchers make a couple plausible connections, for example, suggesting that demethylation affects the AHRR gene’s role in fibroblast apoptosis in lungs. In any case, the data will be very useful to epigeneticists in general. Researchers from the NIH National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, the Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, Duke University, and several other institutions published the paper online at the NIEHS website … Continue reading →

Posted in Applications, DNA Methylation, Developmental Biology, Gene Regulation, Genomewide Methylation Profiling, In Utero | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Just How Similar ARE Newborn Identical Twins, Epigenetically Speaking?

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Chris Womack

It depends on which tissues you’re talking about. And epigenetic modification — or at least methylation — in newborns is dictated by genetic, environmental, and tissue-specific factors, according to research published this month by Lavinia Gordon and colleagues at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and six other universities, research centers, and hospitals. First the tissue-based factor. Using statistical clustering, the mostly Australian multi-institutional group found that the methylation profiles of identical twins segregated into the same categories — the same general patterns of DNA modification — more often or less often, depending on the DNA’s tissue of origin. in  placental tissue, 71 percent of twin pairs’ methylation patterns “clustered” together statistically. In cord blood mononuclear cells (CBMC), identical twins shared … Continue reading →

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Epigenetics of Life’s Endpoints – Q&A with Manel Estell er of IDIBELL

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Chris Womack

Why are tumors more common as we age? Why are we more susceptible to infection? And why does everything continue to function just a little bit worse for every day of our lives? This whole process inspired a great Kinks song. More topically, Manel Esteller thinks it might be possible to slow some of it down — maybe even reverse it. Among other roles, Dr. Esteller is editor of the journal Epigenetics and director of the Cancer Epigenetics and Biology Program at the Bellvitge Institute of Biomedical Research, known as IDIBELL. Only last week, I got to talk with Dr. Esteller about the epigenetics of aging and research he just published with colleagues comparing the genome-wide DNA methylation of newborns … Continue reading →

Posted in Applications, DNA Methylation, Genomewide Methylation Profiling, Immunology, Leukemia, Oncology, Regenerative Medicine | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

More of Adenovirus’s Epigenetic Tricks

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Chris Womack

Adenovirus’s epigenetic power to reprogram cells goes beyond its ability to cause tumorous replication — G.J. Fonseca and colleagues at the Western University of Ontario report in the new Cell Host & Microbe that it’s also able to sabotage the interferon response, which usually functions as a first line of defense in infected cells. In an April post, I interviewed Roberto Ferrari about adenovirus research and its ability to push cells back into active tumor-like replication, so I thought this bit of news was an interesting incremental step in overall knowledge of how invaders — particularly adenovirus — use epigenetics against us. What a bunch of jerks! In particular, Fonseca and colleagues used a yeast two-hybrid screen to find out … Continue reading →

Posted in Chromatin Structure, Gene Regulation, Histone Modifications, Histones, Microbial Epigenetics, Ubiquitination, Virology | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment