Epigenetics video - Ghost in your genes - questions PDF

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BBC Horizon: The Ghost in Your Genes (49:06) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dibpxvU4ml0 Note: Questions are grouped by research and not necessarily in chronological order of occurrence in the video.

General Ideas 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Describe the conventional biology regarding our genetic inheritance? How many genes do scientists now think exists in the human genome? Why did the number of gene perplex scientists? What is genomic imprinting? What is epigenetics? Why was that important in light of the 30,000 genes finding?

Pembry’s Paradox 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

What are some of the symptoms of Angelman’s syndrome? What are some of the symptoms of Prader-Willi syndrome? What was the genetic mutation in Angelman and Prader-Willi’s syndromes? What was the paraxdox with the Prader-Willi & Angelman’s syndromes? What did Pembry notice about the inheritance pattern for the conditions? Based on this finding, what did Pembry hypothesize? In other words, how did he think chromosome 15 knew where it came from when the genetic sequence was the same? 12. Describe Marcus Pembry’s speculation about why genes would carry memory from one generation to another.

Reik: IVF & Beckwith-Wiedemann 13. The Mullins used IVF to conceive. Their son Ciaran was born with Beckwith-Wiedemann Syndrome. What are the symptoms of Beckwith-Wiedemann Syndrome? 14. What did Wolf Reik find in his research with mouse embryos? How did this relate to human IVF? 15. How did the Beckwith-Wiedemann risk factor change with IVF conception? 16. At that time, most thought that changes to the genes, the switches, could not be inherited. Reik showed otherwise. Why was his findings so significant? What does his findings imply?

Yehuda & Sekl: 9/11 post-traumatic stress 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

What did Rachel Yehuda observe at her clinic for treating Holocaust survivors and what did she hypothesize? Describe Jonathan Sekl’s experiments with the mice and the conclusions. Explain cortisol’s role in stress management and how it relates to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Describe Sekl and Yehuda’s findings with pregnant women that had PTSD from 9/11. Why is Yehuda & Sekl’s findings still inconclusive? What factor must they rule out? What would they need to do next in their studies, what data do they need?

Pembry & Bygren: Famine in Överkalix Sweden 22. What were some characteristics of the town of Överkalix (Sweden) that made it such a good place for the study of epigenetics? 23. What was Pembry & Bygren trying to correlate from the data available? 24. What did they observe and conclude? 25. They went back to the records a second time to study which specific period in the grandparent could affect the grandchild. What did theyobserve and conclude? 26. Describe Mike Skinner’s experiments with rats and the observations....