You won’t believe what Samie Jaffrey’s group at Cornell is confirming and elucidating about epigenetics, the fantastic adaptation capability cells have to adjust to environmental shifts. Epigenetics is a broad term for a range of adaptation capabilities achieved via the regulation of gene expression. Gene expression can be regulated, for example, by attaching small chemical markers such as methyl groups, like bar codes, to DNA or to the histone proteins about which the DNA is wrapped. Such chemical modifications have been known to be used also on the DNA copy—the messenger RNA—used to synthesize proteins. What Jaffrey’s group has found is that mRNA methylation is ubiquitous. Something like 20% of the transitory mRNA molecules are methylated in human cells. This Read More ›