Blog 39: Epigenetics
Hey everyone! Welcome back to the blog series. After last week’s blog on gene regulation, I kept thinking about other fundamental science topics I should talk about. And after looking through Google for about 2 hours today, I decided to write and dive deeper into a perspective of the Synthetic Biology world that is frequently mentioned in my AP Bio class: Epigenetics. So far in this series, we’ve learned that genes can be turned on or off. But, what actually controls whether parts of DNA are even accessible in the first place? This question is an important one to ask because of one important aspect of Biology: just because a gene exists doesn’t mean a cell can easily use it. What Is Epigenetics? Epigenetics refers to changes in gene expression that don’t involve altering the DNA sequence itself. The DNA code stays the same, but how that code is read can change. If gene regulation is about deciding which genes to activate, epigenetics is about controlling how accessible those...