I was reading
this issue of Focus Magazine today because they had an interesting article about the '
Maternal Effect' and epigenetics. Some interesting things that I thought I would post in this thread.
This study of women who were pregnant whilst involved in a
stressful situation:
quote:
Pregnant women caught up in the September 11 World Trade Centre collapse have passed on markers of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to their unborn babies, scientists from Edinburgh and the United States have found. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh and Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York showed that the biological effects of trauma can be transmitted from a mother to her unborn baby,
There is quite a lot of work on The Maternal Effect and its role in evolution, for example:
Maternal effects and the evolution of aposematic signals (
aposematic refers to an organism advertising its dangerousness to predators (by colour patterns etc)):
quote:
Unlike a zygotically expressed gene, a maternally
expressed aposematism gene will be hidden from selection
because it is not phenotypically expressed in the first
individual with the mutation. Furthermore, the first individual
carrying the new mutation will produce an entire family of
aposematic offspring, thereby providing an immediate fitness
advantage to this gene.
Interesting stuff. I have a learned a new word,
epigenesis
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