Epigenetic Control of Gene Expression with Dr Marnie Blewitt

Key Takeaways

hello my name is mani blut and I'm a laboratory head at the Walter analyzer Hall Institute of Medical Research and I have a lab that works on epigenetic control and I teach epigenetics at the University of Melbourne so this course on epigenetic control of gene expression is going to be a really exciting course what so what is epigenetic control one of the things that really fascinates biologists is how it is that all of our different cells within a human body can have the same genetic information the same book of instructions and yet end up with such different functions so if you compare the function of a cell that is found in a hair follicle and it's involved in making keratin and making the hair shaft compared with a liver cell they have distinctly different functions and yet they have the same set of instructions so what we Now understand is that this is enabled by having only some of those genes or some of those instructions um being used at any one time in each of these different cell types that we have in in our body so how is that we can have some genes being used or switched on and some genes being switched off and really this happens by epigenetic control and what this course is about is is teaching you about how epigenetic control works within the cell at the molecular level and how that leads to different expression of different genes within each cell type the simplest way to think about epigenetic marks or epigenetic control is like punctuation marks in English so if you think of the string of 26 letters that we have in the alphabet if you put them all together and you remove all the commas and full stops capital letters bases exclamation marks they're just strings of letters and it's very difficult to see what a sentence might say let alone a paragraph or um a chapter or a whole book well in the human genome or any other genome it's the same sort of thing except that here we just have four letters rather than 26 and epigenetic marks are a bit like punctuation marks they're like that formatting the exclamation marks the full stops and commas they allow the cell to be able to see each gen and see each piece of information um they allow them to read it so for example exclamation marks might be on genes that are need to be used within a particular cell and full stops might be on the genes that don't need to be used and so if you keep this analogy of punctuation marks in mind when you learn about epigenetic control it'll be very helpful so what this course will do is go through some examples of how epigenetic control works at the molecular level how um what we've learned from um lower organisms like yeast plants flies and worms and then move on to the majority of the course which will be focused on mamalian epigenetics so how epigenetic control contributes to normal development and how it goes wrong in disease so I hope you'll join me on this exciting um learning of epigenetic control thanks