Related Questions
- Is there a way to predict the likelihood of a person suffering from a genetic disease by analysing their DNA?
- What kind of samples do you test
- when doing an experiment on epigenics What do you do with left-over samples?
- What training or expertise do you have to be able to perform experiments on epigenics*?
By BRIDGE8 under license from Mangorolla CIC 2024
Hi awesome kid…. I love these epigenetics questions!
We look a lot at the difference between cancer cells and normal cells. One of the things we measure is the amount of ‘methylation’ that occurs on the DNA.
DNA can become ‘methylated’ which means an tiny CH3 chemical structure attaches to the DNA molecule. For some reason this tiny chemical structure has HUGE impacts on how the DNA is read by the cell.
In cancer cells, there is a lot of methylation in certain parts of the DNA that turns genes off. So we can compare what parts of the DNA are methylated in cancer compared with normal cells to see what might be the cause of the cancer cell.
It is really important to have a ‘normal’ control to see what the reference is – like you said – it needs to be reliable!
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