Reading Our Genome Is Tough, But Epigenetics Is Giving Us Valuable Clues
10th March 2015
Just about every cell in a human body has the same DNA, packaged into the same chromosomes. But cells differentiate, growing into different tissue types with different functions. The epigenome works through molecules like methyl and acetyl groups that wheedle their way into DNA, exposing different genes to the machinery that reads them and makes proteins. That helps control when or whether those proteins get made at all, and it’s also critical to that process of differentiation. “In each cell type, it unravels just the right genes,” says Brad Bernstein, a biologist at Harvard University. “It unravels just the right switches.