Epigenetics

Maria's mother and father are good tennis players. They have practiced a lot. But, that doesn't mean Maria is any good at tennis. Because, traits that a person has learned or gathered - acquired properties - are not inherited. But this is actually not the whole truth.

In recent years it has turned out that children can inherit properties, which are caused by their parents' environment, rather than their genes. This is called epigenetics. Do you remember about genes? Inside your cells, in the nucleus of the cell, there are chromosomes. A chromosome consists of two DNA molecules, and thousands of genes.

It works like a cookbook. The genes are the recipes in the cookbook. The cell reads a recipe and cooks up whatever is written in it. Or rather: the cell decodes the gene, and produces the protein that is described by the gene. But, different kinds of cell use different recipes.

A muscle cell for example, only reads the recipe for proteins that build muscle. And a brain cell reads the recipes for proteins that are needed in the brain. So, how does the cell know which recipe to follow? Well, look right here! It looks like there are sticky notes attached in the cookbook.

On these notes it says: Use this! and: Don't use this! Some recipes - some genes - are to be used in this cell. They are active. And other genes are not to be used.

They are inactive. These notes are called epigenetic flags. It's their job to make each cell only read its own recipes, and not the entire cookbook. The genes that you have, you inherited from your biological parents. And genes are normally not affected at all by the environment.

You'll have exactly the same recipes when you die as you had when you were born. Those epigenetic flags on the other hand, they are influenced by the environment. The flags change, according to your diet, how much you exercise, if you are subject to environmental toxins... And the flags, affect which genes are used in your body, and thereby your characteristics! Sooooo, if you were to inherit epigenetic flags from your parents, then that means that you can inherit... ...

characteristics that are acquired! And the very latest research in epigenetics shows that exactly this is possible! This is how it can happen: Before you were born, your biological parents carried the gametes - the egg and the sperm - that would become you. The environment that your parents lived in, might have caused some epigenetic flag to end up on a chromosome in one of their gametes. At conception, it's possible, that one of those flags might follow along into your first cell.

In that case, you may have inherited something, that was caused by your parents' environment. If so, you inherited an acquired characteristic! This way of inheriting seems to be quite unusual. And, when it happens, it seems to be mostly related to diseases, such as cancer. There is actually one more opportunity for you to inherit something from your parents' environment, from before you were born.

And that was when you were in your mother's belly. When you were a growing fetus inside the womb, you were affected by your mother's eating, drinking, resting, if she was stressed out, or depressed, or subject to environmental toxins. Some of these events in the environment placed epigenetic flags on your chromosomes, which can still influence you today. So, the environment that your parents lived in, before you were born, may leave traces in the form of epigenetic flags on your chromosomes, which can affect your characteristics a lot later in life. But, no, you can't inherit the characteristic of being a good tennis player.