Kobor – early life epigenetics explained

Basically epigenetics, offers a number of opportunities to understand human health, and I think the most exciting one is to understand really the impact of early life experience on things that happen later on in life. The reason for that is something we like to think of epigenetics is that we have 25 thousand genes. All of us have 25 thousand genes and I always equal a gene with a light bulb. You can think of a light bulb totally turned on or totally turned off, and if you have a fancy home you might have a dimmer switch. And so you can think of this light bulb either totally on, totally off, or anywhere in between. The epigenetics to some extent actually serves as a dimmer switch for brightness of this light bulb. And so if you think you have 25 thousand light bulbs in every single cell and you have 25 thousand dinner switches that can be set differently depending on your early life experiences, you appreciate there’s quite a complexity in the system. But the key thing about it is that once that dimmer switch has been set, it often sticks with you for a long time.  

So for example, some of the work we have been doing is showing that this dimmer switch can be set by, in infants, in part by the stress of the parents; the stress level of the parents. So if you’re very stressed it might just tweak with that dimmer switch a little bit and then we can see that 15 years later. And so, if it happens that some of these dimmer switches affect genes that are involved in a variety of diseases, you could easily imagine how that could be very important for the development of disease, or for that matter, the prevention of disease.  

It’s really early days I think we need to be aware of this. It’s really an emerging field, but I think there is now a growing body of evidence that indeed, particularly these early life experiences can tweak with these dimmer switches, and not only do in a temporary manner, but likely do so in a persistent manner that really, as I said initially, helps to explain how experiences literally get under our skin to affect the activity of our genes in a long lasting fashion. Social experience, nutritional experience, all kind of experience.