Epigenetics is somewhat comparable to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, in that reasonable epigenetics (lack of fetal alcohol poisoning) is the norm and considered neutral. Unusually bad epigenetics (like Dolly the first cloned sheep had) can, like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, reduce your potential quality of life and potential lifetime achievements.
So… be careful not to mess up the epigenetics of your clones or you’ll have a significantly less useful clone army?
In 2016, scientists reported no defects in thirteen cloned sheep, including four from the same cell line as Dolly. The first study to review the long-term health outcomes of cloning, the authors found no evidence of late-onset, non-communicable diseases other than some minor examples of osteoarthritis and concluded “We could find no evidence, therefore, of a detrimental long-term effect of cloning by SCNT on the health of aged offspring among our cohort.
I don’t have a good reference and I left bioinformatics a couple of years ago, so I am open to being corrected by someone who is more in the loop. To me the general picture seems to be:
There was a huge hype around epigenetics maybe 10,15? years ago, when epigenetics was supposed to explain everything. This hype has basically vanished.
The epigenetics results in human all seemed to look like: The effect skips a generation and only goes from grandfather to granddaughter, p < 0.038. Hence E-p-hack-netics. I think you just can’t publish this kind of result any more these days.
I think our ability to read out methylation patterns has improved. For example the third generation sequencing technologies like PacBio sequencing were able to read methylation patterns directly. Third generation sequencing hit the market ten years ago and became generally accepted maybe 5 years ago, which would support a story where we gained the ability to measure accurately and the effects vanished.
There were results like with dolly, where later investigations overturned the initial theorising.
The general mechanism of epigenetics also came under fire if I remember correctly. I don’t remember this very well, but something about methylation patterns resetting during oogenesis or embryogenesis?
Many of the stories just didn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Epigenetically transmitted trauma? How does that evolve?
Generally smart guys became dismissive about epigenetics I think mostly because, like you, they caught a whiff of research smell.
I am not very sure in the single claims, because they are based on things I read or heard over the years and generally quite a few years ago. But overall things just seemed to overwhelmingly point in the same direction. Though I do have to say that some of the mice results looked more robust, but of course those come from a much bigger sample size.
I, too, would definitely be interested in a concrete analysis “What the hell happened to epigenetics” by an actual geneticist—ideally without a horse in the race. But right now I have a strong prior that epigenetics is mostly bunk.
Epigenetics is somewhat comparable to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, in that reasonable epigenetics (lack of fetal alcohol poisoning) is the norm and considered neutral. Unusually bad epigenetics (like Dolly the first cloned sheep had) can, like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, reduce your potential quality of life and potential lifetime achievements. So… be careful not to mess up the epigenetics of your clones or you’ll have a significantly less useful clone army?
Epigenetics is basically E-p-hack-netics.
Totally unclear to me whether there are any results in that space that are robust.
Dolly was probably totally fine. From wikipedia:
This matches my impression, though my impression is based more on “research smell” than any concrete analysis. Do you have good references?
I don’t have a good reference and I left bioinformatics a couple of years ago, so I am open to being corrected by someone who is more in the loop. To me the general picture seems to be:
There was a huge hype around epigenetics maybe 10,15? years ago, when epigenetics was supposed to explain everything. This hype has basically vanished.
The epigenetics results in human all seemed to look like: The effect skips a generation and only goes from grandfather to granddaughter, p < 0.038. Hence E-p-hack-netics. I think you just can’t publish this kind of result any more these days.
I think our ability to read out methylation patterns has improved. For example the third generation sequencing technologies like PacBio sequencing were able to read methylation patterns directly. Third generation sequencing hit the market ten years ago and became generally accepted maybe 5 years ago, which would support a story where we gained the ability to measure accurately and the effects vanished.
There were results like with dolly, where later investigations overturned the initial theorising.
The general mechanism of epigenetics also came under fire if I remember correctly. I don’t remember this very well, but something about methylation patterns resetting during oogenesis or embryogenesis?
Many of the stories just didn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Epigenetically transmitted trauma? How does that evolve?
Generally smart guys became dismissive about epigenetics I think mostly because, like you, they caught a whiff of research smell.
I am not very sure in the single claims, because they are based on things I read or heard over the years and generally quite a few years ago. But overall things just seemed to overwhelmingly point in the same direction. Though I do have to say that some of the mice results looked more robust, but of course those come from a much bigger sample size.
I, too, would definitely be interested in a concrete analysis “What the hell happened to epigenetics” by an actual geneticist—ideally without a horse in the race. But right now I have a strong prior that epigenetics is mostly bunk.
Whoa! That’s a very different story from the one I was given back when studying genetics. Thanks for pointing that out.