Wednesday, May 07, 2008
STRESS and DNA
Epigenetics, stress, change in DNA
This article is nearly shocking, not because it shows something new, but because it only reveals facts I described already a long time ago.
So, this is a simple summary for those who have not had the chance to read my previous posts.
Every organism is exposed to some flood of information and it must decide which information to store and which not. This decision making is based on the simplest possible manner: the number of repetitions gives the level of importance of the repeated information.
The system of storing information is in a chemical way, in DNA. As there are different levels of importance of different information, there must be also different chemical ways to differentiate among these different levels of importance.
Because this coding and storing takes place in a chemical way there can be also chemical disturbances, so there must be a way how to minimize occasional damage to the chemical type of memory.
Genes are only 2% of DNA, 98% are other information, at present time subject to epigenetics. There can be several different levels of importance of information and therefore also several different ways of coding and storing such information, one can be in epigenetic level the other one in genetic level.
Genes usually do not alter fast and do not react to slight changes in the informational environment of organisms. Epigenetic information fluctuates much more. This ahs been already proved in studies of identical twins.
Stress brings about some chemical bodily response, and this response can damage or reinforce some other chemical systems in body, e.g. the stored information, that should be passed to the next generation. Lamarck is a good source of study for this idea. The guy was right.
As abuse involves stress, this is exactly what the article describes, and therefore it makes huge sense to avoid as much stress as possible. It may show up after many new studies that certain stress might be ok, but we still do not know, and this is only a guess, because we still do not understand how information is processed, coded, stored and referred to in DNA.
This is on purpose only a short way of explaining how this system might work, everybody can read about it in the internet, but it takes time to read myriads of studies on different but related topics.
This article is nearly shocking, not because it shows something new, but because it only reveals facts I described already a long time ago.
So, this is a simple summary for those who have not had the chance to read my previous posts.
Every organism is exposed to some flood of information and it must decide which information to store and which not. This decision making is based on the simplest possible manner: the number of repetitions gives the level of importance of the repeated information.
The system of storing information is in a chemical way, in DNA. As there are different levels of importance of different information, there must be also different chemical ways to differentiate among these different levels of importance.
Because this coding and storing takes place in a chemical way there can be also chemical disturbances, so there must be a way how to minimize occasional damage to the chemical type of memory.
Genes are only 2% of DNA, 98% are other information, at present time subject to epigenetics. There can be several different levels of importance of information and therefore also several different ways of coding and storing such information, one can be in epigenetic level the other one in genetic level.
Genes usually do not alter fast and do not react to slight changes in the informational environment of organisms. Epigenetic information fluctuates much more. This ahs been already proved in studies of identical twins.
Stress brings about some chemical bodily response, and this response can damage or reinforce some other chemical systems in body, e.g. the stored information, that should be passed to the next generation. Lamarck is a good source of study for this idea. The guy was right.
As abuse involves stress, this is exactly what the article describes, and therefore it makes huge sense to avoid as much stress as possible. It may show up after many new studies that certain stress might be ok, but we still do not know, and this is only a guess, because we still do not understand how information is processed, coded, stored and referred to in DNA.
This is on purpose only a short way of explaining how this system might work, everybody can read about it in the internet, but it takes time to read myriads of studies on different but related topics.
# posted by Dalibor @ 11:23 AM 
