Jones – prism model example

So one example of how this prism might work is there’s a particular animal model called Agouti viable yellow. And it’s a funny name but what it means is it controls the colour that these mice turn out to be. So it controls their hair colour. And Agouti viable yellow is really interesting because if you have just a regular population of mice that have Agouti viable yellow they are on a spectrum from yellow to brown and lots of different sort of mottled in between colours. 

And so I like to use that as a visual representation of how that rainbow would look at the end of the prism. So you have brown mice at one end and you have yellow mice at the other and they’re all the way in between. And so the way this works if you feed a pregnant female mouse regular mouse chow which is a thing that you could buy in the store, you can buy mouse chow. Then you get a smaller sort of spectrum. Typically, you get mostly like mid-yellow, mid-brown offspring. The mice turn out to be medium yellow, medium brown.  

But if you alter her diet, and you change some of the macro nutrients in the diet, you actually get a change to that prism. Her offspring’s epigenome changes shape and that results in a different spectrum of coat colours. You get more yellow mice or more brown mice depending on how you change the diet.  

And that’s an interesting thing. You get different coat colours, that’s cool but what does it mean in terms of health is mice that are very, very yellow, mice that are very, very brown, when they’re young, they’re very similar. But as they grow older, the yellow mice become quite obese, they become insulin resistant and they get all hallmarks of mouse diabetes. So this is an indication that an early life exposure; this change in maternal diet during pregnancy result in this sort of shift in the spectrum because of those changes to the prism that can result in much later life health outcomes that are different between the two ends of that rainbow.