Terrific story on epigenetics

Epigenetics is all about the mechanisms that control gene expression--put simply, when genes are turned on or off. In his story in C&EN, Amato explores where this science is headed and does a great job.

Recognition that environmental factors, including chemical contaminants, can alter gene expression is driving a revolution in the environmental health sciences. Alterations in how genes behave can be just as powerful as genetic mutations in affecting human health, and a rapidly expanding body of literature indicates it takes far less of a chemical to change gene expression than to cause a mutation.

The impact of altered gene expression is especially relevant during fetal life: gene expression controls fetal development, and errors in gene expression can cause health problems that echo throughout a lifetime, including all the way to old age.

Amato writes: "To those researchers uncovering the molecular biology of epigenetics, there is a conceptual shift, potentially Copernican in scale, in the offing. ... Just as the Copernican solar system jerked Earth away from the system’s center, epigenetics researchers are dethroning the gene as biology’s center of the universe."

Amato reports that scientists working on epigenetics see this a a framework that "finally can provide scientific moorings for intuitions about nature-nurture connections."  Genes are inherited, but their behavior depends upon environmental factors, including contaminants, diet, stress and experience.

Amato's story goes far in conveying the excitement of scientists working in this field and the promise they sense for understanding how environmental factors contribute to human disease. 

He could have gone farther, however.  These discoveries are redefining what it means for a disease to be linked to a gene.  Research reports, for example, from the Human Genome Project regularly reveal that yet another disease has a has a genetic basis. This is almost always interpreted fatalistically by the public:  "Did I inherit the bad form, or not?"  The realization that environmental factors act through epigenetic mechanisms to control gene expression gives rise to a very different question:  "Is there an environmental factor, for example, a contaminant, that is altering that gene's expression?"  If so, some portion of the burden of that disease may be preventable by reducing exposures.  All of a sudden, a genetic disease becomes preventable because interventions can reduce environmental exposures.  The implications and the promise are enormous.

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