Epigenetics

Identical Twins:

1. The twins change over time, due to different experiences and environments that occur within the twins' life time. The epigenome conforms to these changes with epigenetic tags that can turn a gene on or off.

2. Environmental factors

Stress, diet, exercise, and release of toxins all can change the epigenome.

3. What is an imprinted gene?

An imprinted gene is a gene that does not have its epigenetic tags wiped out during "cleansing", the process in which an embryo loses most of its parents' epigenetic tags.

Your Environment, Your Epigenome:

I certainly think my diet will certainly change my future life, and my strong disliking of toxins will also contribute. My diet has been quite balanced, however, I have not been eating as healthily when I am stressed. Also, I hope I never try drugs because of their high one-time damage. However, the true dent caused by them are because of addiction, where you will never be able to rectify your epigenome.

LICK YOUR RATS

When a rat is newborn, its mother can change its future behavior forever. The change is through the simple process of grooming and licking a rat. The more licked a rat is, the more calm and relaxed it is in adulthood, and it will reciprocate the licking to younger rats. This licking activates the glucocorticoid receptor (GR), which helps reduce the response to high stress. In the hippocampus, highly-licked rats will send out a calming signal during "Flight or Fight", through the bonding of the hormone cortisol and the GR protein.

This mechanism also applies to humans. When humans are well cared for during childhood, they develop less angst and are less likely to have diabetes and heart disease. Kids who aren't usually become socially low-standing and disliked. However, too much care in humans can also shut children off from the real world which isn't as rosy as it is supposed to be. So-called "helicopter" parents and over-nurturing parents may develop a need to be carefully nurtured, which may hurt self-reliance in adulthood.

Nutrition

Throughout our lives, our diet will change the way our genes are expressed. Consumption of folic acid, B vitamins, and SAM-e, all instrumental in the creation of methyl tags, by the mother during pregnancy is vital to not have chronic under-methylation. If this occurs during your adult life, it will effect you, but it is easily reversed with proper diet.

However, mothers are not the only people who can change your diet. A will-kept log of a small Swedish towns crop harvest showed a correlation between paternal grandparents' diet between 9 and 12 and their grandkids. When there was less food in the grandparent's childhood, the grandchildren would live substantially longer than if their grandparents were fed more.

Epigenetics and the Human Brain

High dietary methyl consumption stabilizes gene expression. This difference is rooted in the epigenetic tags created by methyl, which regulates genes and their amounts of output. Children who are abused that commit suicide have substantially more methyl tags on ribosomal RNA, causing them not to be expressed. Drugs like cocaine create more epigenetic tags in vital parts of the brain, causing relapse and addiction.