Rather than "genetic" changes that are locked into DNA, these are known as "epigenetic" changes.
More permanent is not the same as indelible, and epigenetic changes are not passed on indefinitely.
ECONOMIST: Genomics has not yet delivered the drugs, but it will
But, in this case, the epigenetic modification could be inherited from either the mother or the father.
Nadeau said the changes she is seeing in children are epigenetic essentially changing the activity of their genes.
It is judged to result from epigenetic changes arising during the cloning process.
Furthermore, every cancer cell in a patient is also generally unique with thousands of unique genetic and epigenetic alterations.
Recently, it has been shown that germ-cells, too, are subject to epigenetic change, sometimes in response to environmental stimuli.
They hypothesise that epigenetic effects may be so dramatic that merely altering these imprints can create a new species.
Epigenetic changes are heritable changes to the regulation of a cell's genes, caused by extra molecules being attached to those genes.
But last year Emma Whitelaw, a biochemist at the University of Sydney, demonstrated that epigenetic traits could be inherited in mice.
If epigenetic features are heritable, then they may cause diseases that run in families as much as ordinary genetic mutations do.
"There's no question that almost every cancer cell has problems with the epigenetic programming, " said Professor Moshe Szyf, from McGill University in Montreal.
These can be disrupted by damage directly to their DNA - but it's now been realised that epigenetic changes could also be responsible.
But what is new, and intriguing, is that they discovered, for the first time, evidence that a phenomenon called epigenetic change is at work.
To the extent that epigenetic marking is involved in creating social status, then, status may be being maintained by the animal's cells as they replicate.
The fundamental problem is that cancer is an enormously complex, unpredictable evolutionary process characterized by extreme genetic and epigenetic diversity that occurs within the patient.
Prenatal insults including chemical and radiation exposure can create epigenetic patterns of gene expression that will stay with you forever, even if your actual genes are undamaged.
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At the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, Dr Jean Pierre Issa has been pioneering the use of two epigenetic drug therapies - decitabine and azacitidine.
Researchers in the department currently have one on-going study funded by Nu Skin related to the identification of master regulators and epigenetic changes to human skin aging.
In a study published in the May issue of Nature Genetics, researchers at Princeton University disrupted the epigenetic imprints on several mice genes by crossing two related strains of mice.
In mammals, this kind of epigenetic modification has been assumed to last only during the life span of a particular animal, because such changes are usually erased in the sperm and egg cells.
Dr Whitelaw's work is one part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that understanding inherited epigenetic features may be necessary to work out how animals pass on physical characteristics or susceptibility to disease.
This, some researchers hypothesise, might be encouraged by children inheriting epigenetic patterns appropriate to the diets of their parents but inappropriate to the different, more calorific diets those children are enjoying thanks to the abundance of modern life.
ECONOMIST: Genomics has not yet delivered the drugs, but it will
Rudolf Jaenisch. (Applause.) The 2010 National Medal of Science to Rudolph Jaenisch, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for improving our understanding of epigenetic regulation of gene expression, the biological mechanisms that affect how genetic information is variably expressed.
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The evolutionary nature of cancer implies, contrary to conventional wisdom, that the essential features of any therapy for the consistent cure or control of cancer must be independent of the particular pathways of tumor cell evolution, and independent of any particular genetic or epigenetic alterations.
That "something" could be hormone levels in utero, epigenetic factors that turn autism susceptibility genes "on" and "off" during development, or the fact that young girls have in general better social skills than boys and so need a bigger "dose" of what causes ASD to cross that threshold to being impaired.
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