1. The video that we watched was about identical twins and their genetic make up. Identical twins are the same genetically, but their epigenomes are different, it depends on what type of environment the twins are in. One of them might be really healthy and exercise and the other might just sit on the couch and eat junk food and they may be exposed to toxins like smoke. Their epigenome becomes increasingly different with age because their epigenetic tags are in different places, this is caused by the different environments that each twin is in, like I mentioned before.
2. Some environmental factors that influence your epigenome are your diet, stress, exercise, and the types of pollution or different toxins that you are exposed to.
3. Imprinted genes are genes who's expression is determines by the parents that contributed them. Imprinted genes violate the usual rule of inheritance that both alleles in a heterozygote are equally expressed. Genomic imprinting is a genetic phenomenon by which certain genes are expressed in a parent-of-origin-specific manner. It is an inheritance process independent of the classical Mendelian inheritance. Imprinted genes are either expressed only from the allele inherited from the mother.
Your environment, Your Epigenome
1. Some factors that would affect your epigenome would be diet, exercise, and stress. If someone only eats junk food and doesn't exercise then their epigenome would be much different from someone that have a healthy diet and exercises 2-5 times a week. Diet is very important and if you have a bad diet then you will get fat and then you have a greater chance of getting deseases that have to do with your weight like diabetes.
Lick your Rats
1. If the rat has a high- nurturing mother then it does help the rats epigenome. The rat will be more calm later in life due to the high nurturing that its mother gave it. If the rat had a low- nurturing then the rat will be more stressed out later in life and the rat will not be able to deal with stress well.
2. When the mother licks the rat pup and nurtures it then the GR gene is activated.
3. Inside the brain sits a structure called the hippocampus. One job of the hippocampus is to coordinate the body's response to stress. In the hippocampus cells produce a little or a lot of GR protein depending on how much the pup was nurtured. During the "fight or flight" response, the hormone cortisol is released into the blood stream. Cortisol binds GR protein causing the cell to send out calming signals. Rats who have a lot of GR protein relax quickly after stress. Rats with little GR protein remain stressed for much longer.
4. A human mother and a rat mother are the same, except for a rat is furry, but they are the same with how they treat their offspring or their children. A rat mother will lick their child to make them calmer and less stressed, a human mother will do that to but not by licking their kids. A human mother will care for the child, be nice, and feed it and that will help the childs epigenome, and their social and personal levels.
Nutrition and the Epigenome
1. The food we eat affects gene expression by high methyl foods causing major alters in our gene expression as seen in the rats.
2. Yes. They affect the genome of their offspring in ways such as producing enough, or the correct, amount of chemicals or nutrients needed to survive. If the parent is eating unhealthy they may have trouble with doing this and may hurt the development of the offspring.
Epigenetics and the Human Brain
1. More methyl means less rRNA production, which means fewer ribosomes, which means less protein production.
2. DNA methylation stabilize gene expression, which is important for long-term storage of information.
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