Epigenetics is a complex field of study that has rapidly expanded within the last three decades as DNA technology has advanced, allowing scientists to explain hereditary traits that could not be elucidated by Mendel’s laws. Through extensive study of non-Mendelian inheritance, epigenesists developed a number of mechanisms for the alteration of gene expression that occurred outside of the actual DNA sequence. In addition, changes in the epigenetic expression of DNA have lead scientists to believe diseases, such as some cancers, have an epigenetic basis. Nevertheless, the implications of epigenetics were first categorized in the early twentieth century by a number of researchers.
Decades after the publication of Gregor Mendel’s now famous experiments …show more content…
Utilizing his knowledge in a multidisciplinary experiment with the bithorax mutation in Drosophila, Waddington caused four wings to form in an adult fly rather than the wild type two wings. In the experiment, he used wild type flies treated with ether to produce the mutated phenotype. Next, he performed selective breeding for the phenotype, creating a true breeding fly within twenty generations. Under the current thought of Mendelian genetics, the mutation in the parent fly should not be passed down to the next generation. Nevertheless, Waddington was able to disprove this widely accepted fact through the experiment. Waddington called this new process “genetic assimilation” because it occurred too fast to be the “novel mutations” normally associated with Mendelian genetics (Bard, …show more content…
Waddington investigated the development cycle of a chick, and he thought the embryo was, at first, undifferentiated. Throughout the embryonic stages, cells and tissues became differentiated (Holliday, 2006). This is strikingly different than Lamarckian genetics since the genes are not changing through interactions with the environment: only the expression of genes is being altered in the developmental process through non-environmental means. In effect, Waddington combined embryology and genetics by comparing the inheritance of genes to the expression of gene products in the progeny. Waddington defined this process, ‘epigenetics,’ as “the causal interactions between genes and their products, which bring the phenotype into being” (Sharma et al.,
Decades after the publication of Gregor Mendel’s now famous experiments …show more content…
Utilizing his knowledge in a multidisciplinary experiment with the bithorax mutation in Drosophila, Waddington caused four wings to form in an adult fly rather than the wild type two wings. In the experiment, he used wild type flies treated with ether to produce the mutated phenotype. Next, he performed selective breeding for the phenotype, creating a true breeding fly within twenty generations. Under the current thought of Mendelian genetics, the mutation in the parent fly should not be passed down to the next generation. Nevertheless, Waddington was able to disprove this widely accepted fact through the experiment. Waddington called this new process “genetic assimilation” because it occurred too fast to be the “novel mutations” normally associated with Mendelian genetics (Bard, …show more content…
Waddington investigated the development cycle of a chick, and he thought the embryo was, at first, undifferentiated. Throughout the embryonic stages, cells and tissues became differentiated (Holliday, 2006). This is strikingly different than Lamarckian genetics since the genes are not changing through interactions with the environment: only the expression of genes is being altered in the developmental process through non-environmental means. In effect, Waddington combined embryology and genetics by comparing the inheritance of genes to the expression of gene products in the progeny. Waddington defined this process, ‘epigenetics,’ as “the causal interactions between genes and their products, which bring the phenotype into being” (Sharma et al.,