The general manual of how to read your big book of encoding DNA

The general manual of how to read your big book of encoding DNA

              to find out who you truly are and can become

For this special first post I would like to break the ice and get personal with you right away by revealing the secrets about who you truly are. While you are struggling to get to know yourself during your whole life, I could take just a single cell from your skin, extract its DNA out of the nucleus and read as if you are an open book to me. The code of your DNA tells me which genes you possess and thereby which proteins you are able to synthesize in the cell. These proteins are the building blocks of the machinery of your cells and thereby the machinery of your body. Yes, the information hidden in DNA of just one single cell is enough to understand your whole body plan. Even though the human body is built out of so many different complex structures, surprisingly, still every cell has exactly the same DNA. Fascinatingly, instead of being a chunk of identical cells, we are made of beautiful fascinating complex structures consisting out of many different cell types with their own specific set of proteins and machinery. But if every cell does contain the same DNA, which encodes proteins, how is it possible to give rise to such different cells? Turns out, every cell has a personal manual to read the big book of its coding DNA. This manual is a very difficult, but to help you out I have made you a summary. The process of genes expressed into proteins is a slave of a master called gene transcription regulation, this is the ability of compounds to bind DNA, determining whether a gene will be expressed or not and at which rate this will happen. For example, when something scares you, adrenaline runs through your veins, triggering adrenaline sensitive cells to activate compounds that will inhibit or promote gene expression and thereby providing a response in cells that will make the body fight, flight or fright. But just as DNA is a slave, gene transcription regulation is a slave of a mechanism called epigenetics. If you thought gene transcription regulation had a bossy attitude towards DNA, you have not seen epigenetics yet. Epigenetics is so bossy, that it is not satisfied with just regulating gene transcription, no this one thinks even bigger and is capable of gene regulation that is just as heritable as DNA itself! Epigenetics are the heritable and reversible changes in gene expression without changing the DNA coding, thereby determining the accessibility of gene regulating compounds to DNA. Such changes to gene expression can be caused by additions of small molecules to DNA that change its molecular properties, or microRNAs, which are small molecules that can interfere with DNA, or structural folding such as modification of the proteins that wrap DNA around them. So, short recap, every cell in our body has a unique set of proteins which are expressed by our genes encoded in DNA determining the machinery of cells. This gene expression is adjustable by reversible gene transcription regulation, which is dependent of the heritable and reversible changes of epigenetics.
            Epigenetic has become a hot and trending topic in biomedical sciences for the last few years since a research group in 2008 for the first time empirical proved that early-life environmental conditions can cause epigenetic changes in humans that persist throughout life. Those epigenetically changes can be induced naturally by ageing or during early development, but also externally by diets, medicines or environmental chemicals. This last fact is what makes epigenetics so sexy for all of us, because epigenetics enables us to influence the outcome of our potential that is captured in the genes of DNA. Once understood which external factors induce which epigenetical changes, lifestyle can be adjusted for a healthier body of yourself and even your future children. Next to that, new insights in understanding the role of epigenetics in diseases could give rise to new targets, providing improved medication. Not only diseases such as cancer are controlled by genes and their expression, but also contributes in mental diseases, such as depression. The mechanisms of our body will still be bound to the book of our individual DNA codes, but at least now we know there are many ways to read this book. Lots of research has to be done and hopefully I could contribute unraveling this big secret hidden in our cells and will the manual of reading the big book of DNA once be finished.

- Lindsci(ence)