3 replies to this topic

[Daniel Cooper]

We know that when the environment in which an organism exits changes that changes to that organism's DNA can occur through acetylation and methylation.  These of course are known an epigenetic changes.

 

Let us say that an organism's environment changes, the new environmental state persists long enough for epigenetic changes to occur, then after a time the environment reverts back to it's original state.

 

We know that these epigenetic changes will persist.  After a time, some of these epigenetic changes will revert back to their original state, only requiring time. 

 

Some faction of these epigenetic changes will be very persistent even after a long period of time in the original environment and in fact may be maladaptive and harmful to the organism.

 

Is there anything that can be done to encourage the acetylation or methylation to reverse such that the organism's DNA is returned back to it's original state as much as possible?

 

 

 

[Hebbeh]

Diet, exercise, and lifestyle are going to be the biggest drivers short of newer technology such as gene editing and targeted drugs.  Of course diet and exercise comprise many variables depending on inherent genetics and goals which require continual fine tuning.

[Daniel Cooper]

I wonder if there are any supplements that might help?  

 

 

 

[tunt01]

I wonder if there are any supplements that might help?  

 

1.  Lack of Biomarkers

 

Part of the problem is being able to effectively measure epigenetic modifications.  If one has an epigenetic 'misprogramming', it'd be very hard to actually analyze and determine outright.  There just isn't availability at the consumer level to do this kind of analysis to even begin to know what you are targeting.  And even if these tools were available, taking a tissue sample of your liver might not be terrible (as intrusive as it is), but we can't exactly take tissue samples of your brain and measure methylation patterns against a database. 

 

As a practical matter, you are probably going to be left looking for a lot of the same observable biomarkers found in blood serum (best Vitamin D etc.) that people like Michael Rae have been doggedly pursuing for years and that means interventions like Hebbeh describes.

 

2.  Interventions

 

If you have an epigenetic 'misprogramming' or are seeking some kind of epigenetic regulation, the interventions one would want will ultimately be those that promote an optimal metabolic profile that will come back to basic principles like diet, exercise, sleep.  Whether or not you need excessive amounts of folate, b12, more exercise than average, etc. will ultimately address these alterations (or not).

 

Actual pharmaceutical interventions like Vidaza, Decitabine (DNMT inhibitors) and Vorinostat, Romidepsin (HDAC inhibitors) are broad system-wide interventions.  They are not gene specific and there is a lot of uncertainty around their use.  It's an interesting area, given that aging itself promotes a genome-wide alteration in methylation characteristics.

 

 

As a side note, I think the most interesting post-translation protein modification would be salsalate and its deacetylation activity as shown by Kroemer and Min.  I think salsalate + fasting + exercise, should also be an epigenetic modification (not just PTM), due to the work by Mattson that promotes longevity and better metabolic profile (mitochondrial biogenesis, OXPHOS, lower glycolysis).

Edited by prophets, 15 March 2018 - 02:31 PM.