SFU physicist looks at how a person’s DNA can be changed
A study by SFU physicist Eldon Emberly and his colleagues has revealed that life experiences and environment can alter a person’s DNA. Emberly is an associate professor in SFU’s Department of Physics, and currently researches topics including gene regulation and chromatin structure, protein unfolding, and biochemical networks and cellular decision-making.
The study has been published online at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and discovers that there is a detectable difference in DNA methylation rates across populations.
Eldon Emberly spoke with The Peak about his recent work, stating, “If you view your sequence of DNA as a piece of text, you can look at the methylation of DNA as taking a black marker to various parts of the text,” Emberly said. “A marked out piece of text no longer can have its information read out; and the same is essentially true for DNA that is methylated.”
Emberly’s study focused on a cohort of similar socioeconomic background but differing childhood environments, and sought to discover if and how these life experiences “marked out” segments of an individual’s DNA via the process of methylation.
Emberly collaborated with a team of scientists from Stanford and the University of British Columbia on the study, which measured DNA methylation in more than 14,000 human genes. They found that DNA methylation across the population did correlate with childhood experience as well as traits such as age, gender and ethnicity.
Though the 92 subjects shared a similar socioeconomic status at the time of the study, Emberly and his collaborators interestingly discovered that differing childhood socioeconomic statuses left a “fingerprint” on the subjects’ DNA.
Emberly does, however, warn that the study’s results are complicated. “DNA methylation is just one of many heritable chemical modifications that happen to DNA in cells,” Emberly said. “The connection between DNA methylation and how it affects how information in the DNA sequence is read out is more complex than expected.”
The research has implications for gene expression traits such as alcoholism, smoking, and cancer. Emberly and his colleagues hope that their study will contribute to “understanding the causes and effects of phenotypic variation in a development context.”
