Re: Changes to DNA

alwaysaskingquestions <alwaysaskingquestions@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"John Wilkins" <j.wilkins1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1i0a442.10aj2jws7vsxiN%j.wilkins1@xxxxxxxxxxxx
alwaysaskingquestions <alwaysaskingquestions@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


<snip good explanation about effect of mutations>

On a related note, what is the latest thinking on the impact of diet on
DNA?
I've tried googling on this but the papers I have found have been very
specialised and too technical for my level of knowledge.

Basically diet doesn't change the *DNA*, but the molecules that attach
to the the bacbone of the DNA. This is called the "methylation patterns"
of the genome, and it is fundamentally important for error correction
(the strand that has the most methylation is treated by the error
correction machinery as if it were the "standard" one, so if the two
strands mismatch, the newer one is edited to match the more methylated
one.

Different diets affect these methylation patterns, which are copied from
parent (mother) to child, so if your diet is poor for your grandparents,
that affects your mother's methylation, and so you inherit it such that
your genes that affect your ability to metabolise food is made more
efficient, leading, as it has in our generation, to increased levels of
obesity in times of better food resources.

Whilst I understand your explanation that diet does not have a *direct*
effect on DNA, does it have an *indirect* effect because of its impact on
the repair mechanism, i.e. as bits of the DNA get repaired, can they end up
with a different structure than they had originally?

Don't know but I rather doubt it. The amount of phosphorylation in
mitochondria causes (I gather - no expert, me) oxidative stress on DNA
in mitochondria, and so I suppose it might affect mtDNA in changing the
rates of error, but they are already high relative to nuclear DNA, so I
understand.

Listen, somebody who knows this stuff, come and help me out...
--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."

.

Relevant Pages

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