Emma Bryan explains that the foods you eat, the amount of sleep you get, the attitude you adopt could affect your own genes – and even the genes of your great-grandchildren. (As seen in Pegasus Pages, March 2014)
DNA is a brilliant molecule. In just about three billion base pairs, it can code for the (approximately) 250,000 proteins in the human body, as well as the three types of RNA required to synthesize these proteins. But if the genome itself wasn’t clever enough, attached to every DNA molecule are sets of chemical “tags” that determine the extent of coiling of the DNA molecule, and therefore which genes are expressed and which proteins formed. Collectively, they are known as the epigenome.