Epigenetics: A Very Brief Summary

This article was written to explain what epigenetics is and the studies found that prove that it could be affected by upbringing or traumatic events. The article begins by describing how two scientist, Michael Meaney a neurobiologist and Moshe Szyf a molecular biologist and geneticist, met. Meaney had previously been studying and wrote a paper on the effects of upbringing in rats having an effect on the level of stress hormones. Szyf who previously while trying to work on his thesis for a doctorate in dentistry met with a biochemistry professor who introduced him to the world of epigenetics. Together they came up with a hypothesis that epigenetic changes can occur in the brain due to upbringing and the attention levels of a mother. Together …show more content…
This change cause the rats who were raised by less attentive mothers to be more sensitive to stress as compared to the others. To better explain that this change was brought on by the mothers behaviors and not her genes they took rat pups raised by inattentive mothers who had high methylation and injected them with a drug to remove methyl groups. This resulted in the rats not showing any of the deficits and their brains did not show the epigenetic changes. After the published a paper together showing their findings there was a rise in the study of epigenetics changing from upbringing and life events. Many researchers like France Champagne, who found that baby rats raised by less attentive mothers had decreased estrogen receptors making them less attentive to their babies, used the findings of Meaney and Szyf as a stepping stone for their own findings. Meaney and Szyf continued on to write dozens of papers on this topic and they dove deeper into finding many important things like the effects of the age traumatic events occur and the epigenetic