Sokolowski – research

So, that’s hopefully helpful to have shown you the difference between gene-by environment interaction, epigenetics. Gene expression is involved in both, we have differences in gene expression because of gene-by environment interaction arising from differences in the DNA sequence, and how they respond or are sensitive to the different environments. We have differences in gene expression, epigenetics, arising from essentially the DNA being covered up so it cannot be expressed.  

This new science of gene-by environment interactions and epigenetics is at its infancies, at its early stages, it’s hugely exciting because of providing us an explanation if you like for nurture, and the interactions between nature and nurture, or genes by the environment, but in terms of the biological mechanism, it’s really at its early stages, and it’s; I would say too early to translate this directly, there may be some implications but we don’t, for instance, want to go into the school and check the genes and say “this kid should be on this regime or that regime, I don’t think we would actually ever be in that situation, on the other hand, we do have these exquisite individual differences between children, and we may be able to understand more about their background, and more about their pre-dispositions. How stable are these epigenetic patterns? We know they’re stable but to some extent, do they last for a lifetime, people have said that this adverse early experience sets this path for later health, learning, functioning in society, we know that if you’ve had early adversity you have a higher chance of heart disease, obesity-related problems, obesity, but not everyone has that, just like there’s some individuals who are smokers all their life, and so we want to understand those individual differences.  

So the stability of those marks, those epigenetic marks, and how they translate from one generation to the other is not known, and then finally what is really not known is how the DNA polymorphisms interact with the epigenetics from a biological point of view, and that’s happening as well. So we would like to have an understanding, of an environmental landscape- how it changes through time, how that environmental landscape interacts with the genetic, the genome, which is, the genome means all the genes, and then how they interact together to create neural circuits that interact with the environment. It’s a huge job but we’re getting there and it’s probably, it is hugely exciting.