Chris Slade:
> [Sue Cobey] said the genes themselves are not  changed.

Well, ideas are changing pretty fast. First, hardly anybody talks
about genes anymore, but coding regions. Before DNA was even
discovered it was assumed that "units" of heredity would be found and
these were preemptively called "genes" like the blue eye gene. But now
it appears that the DNA is about as decipherable as your hard drive.
The information is all there, but scattered about in fragments, and
without good a good indexing system, it would be utterly useless. Just
as you use only a small portion of the contents of your hard drive
when you perform a given task, like typing this email, the cell uses
only a small portion of the DNA when it needs to perform a given
function.

There is a lot of stuff in the genome that may be historical
evolutionary holdovers. Remember at the year 2000, when the computers
were all going to crash? One fact that came out was that a very large
percentage of the code in the operating systems of many "mission
critical" computers was cobbled together modules and snips of code
from previous OS's. A lot of it nobody knew what it was for but you
had to have it in there or other parts simply wouldn't work. It's like
that with the genome, evidently. Where the CPU is, though, is
anybody's guess.

Anyway, it appears that changes are made to the genes every time
they're copied and some of these changes are responses to
environmental factors, including internal cell chemistry. Some of
these changes are passed on from generation. It is no coincidence that
a lot more material is passed from the mother via the egg than from
the father via the sperm. The sperm, as my friend Tom Glenn pointed
out to me recently, is really just a DNA package, from which the egg
picks up new genetic material. The egg contains much more than this.

* * *

Steve Noble:
> A lot of ifs in there, Peter.  I can't imagine that there are so many
of these genetic switching mechanisms that you could ever hope to have as
much control over the behavior of bees as you might like just by regulating
their dietary intake.

I guess I have to explain this a third time (no offense to you Steve,
probably my fault in not being clear). I am not talking about some
kind of redi-mix to make super bees. What I am talking about refers
to, among other things, the original experiment where the researcher
fed jelly from Apis cerana to Apis mellifera larvae, and observed
physical (and behavioral, no doubt) changes. The composition of the
jelly is responsible for profound changes in the developing larvae.
Many or most of these changes are probably caused by regulators
synthesized by the nurse bees in their pharyngeal glands. However,
researchers discovered that similar changes could be brought about
with specific chemicals that "switch" specific areas on the genome.

> Well-known classes of functional elements, such as protein-coding sequences, still cannot be accurately predicted from sequence information alone. Other types of known functional sequences, such as genetic regulatory elements, are even less well understood; undoubtedly new types remain to be defined, so we must be ready to investigate novel, perhaps unexpected, ways in which DNA sequence can confer function. Similarly, a better understanding of epigenetic changes (for example, methylation and chromatin remodelling) is needed to comprehend the full repertoire of ways in which DNA can encode information.

What the future holds is not clear, so call me crazy, but others see:

1) Modulation of expression of all gene products using, for example,
large-scale mutagenesis, small-molecule inhibitors and knock-down
approaches (such as RNA-mediated inhibition)

2) Reusable software modules to facilitate interoperability

3) Methods to elucidate the effects of environmental (non-genetic)
factors and of gene–environment interactions on health and disease

4) Improved knowledge management systems and the standardization of
data sets to allow the coalescence of knowledge across disciplines

> Although a good start has been made, expanded interactions will be required between the sciences (biology, computer science, physics, mathematics, statistics, chemistry and engineering), between the basic and the clinical sciences, and between the life sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. Such interactions will be needed at the individual level (scientists, clinicians and scholars will need to be able to bring relevant issues, concerns and capabilities from different disciplines to bear on their specific research efforts), at a collaborative level (researchers will need to be able to participate effectively in interdisciplinary research collaborations that bring biology together with many other disciplines) and at the disciplinary level (new disciplines will need to emerge at the interfaces between the traditional disciplines).

Source:

"A vision for the future of genomics research"
NATURE; VOL 422; 24 APRIL 2003
www.nature.com/nature

If this thread is boring, please advise me and I'll drop it.

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