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Hello and welcome back to our Coursera

class.
To recap from our last discussion, the
central dogma of biology
is that DNA is used as a template to
transcribe RNA.
And that RNA is used to synthesize
proteins, and
those proteins give you your unique
phenotype of physical characteristics.
And, different cells turn on and turn off
different DNA sequences by a process
called differentiation.
What we're going to about today
is how gene expression is controlled.
Epigenetics is one of the ways gene
expression can be controlled.
Epigenetics is altering gene expression
without actually changing the DNA
sequence.
There are several ways that can be done.
One way is called Metyhlation.
Methylatoin is a process where which
methyl groups are added on to
your DNA sequence and they can affect how
the genes are transcribed.
The chromosomes that you inherited from
your mother are actually
methylated differently than if you had
inherited them from your father.
This is called genomic imprinting.
This means that the DNA received from your
father will be
expressed differently than the DNA
received and inherited from your mother.
So methylation again, will affect the DNA
structure and heavy methylation is
associated with DNA that is not expressed
or used to make RNA,
which we would say is transcriptionally
inactive DNA.
That means that DNA can't be read.
So, imagine this cookbook.
If we had heavy methylation what would we
see is
methyl groups would be added on, on
certain DNA sequences.
And what that's going to do is affect our
ability to read pages of the recipe.
So when I try to actually open and read
the book these methylation
patterns are preventing me from doing it.
As I said earlier, one way methylation can
happen is through imprinting.
If your chromosomes came from your mother
or father, we'd see different methylation
patterns.
Or your lifestyle can alter your

methylation patterns, and

some of those ways include smoking,
stress, and starvation.
So, especially during early development.
If you were deprived of nutrients this can
affect your methylation pattern.
In response
to starvation you have thrifty genes that
can get activated and other genes are
methylated.
This'll change your DNA, DNA expression
and that expression, those
changes can affect any children in the
future you may have.
There have been some interesting studies
about people who grew up under
extreme conditions of starvation during
the Great Depression in the United States.
And now we know that the methylation
patterns are
not just those people, but their children
and even their
grandchildren have been affected.
So even though their children or
grandchildren may
have had the same genes, the different
methylation patterns
can alter the expression of those genes,
and this
can have a huge impact on a person's
phenotype.
So even though they have a specific gene,
it's not expressed.
Normally genes come from protein and one
of the things that we see is
that the DNA sequence determines the amino
sequence in a point to point manner.
We talked about that during our last
discussion with the sickle cell trait.
When DNA is used to make an RNA template
and this happens in a
linear fashion and then that RNA is read
in three letter words called codons.
Before we discuss codons, let's talk a
little bit about the nature of DNA.
Only a small percentage of your DNA codes
for proteins.
There are a lot of regulatory regions on
the DNA.
Some of those regulatory regions are
called promoters, and promote,
these promoters promote transcription in
specific regions of DNA called genes.
We also have enhancer sequences, and you
can guess by the name, they enhance
transcription.
And we have activators which bind the
region
such as enhancers or promoters to again,
increase

transcription.
All of this leads to gene being highly
expressed.
This gene expression can be controlled on
many different levels.
We talked about methylation, which
decreases gene expression.
But we have a strong promoter and
activators that
can be present, and they can increase gene
transcription.
To review a concept I introduced during
our last lecture,
form dictates function, and that doesn't
just apply to proteins.
It actually applies to everything,
from the type of chair, the shape of the
chair, how a door is designed to open and
close.
This means that the form or shape of
anything.
DNA in this of course, is related directly
to its function.
So methylated DNA can't be read, that's
changed its shape and in turn its
function.
So, highly compacted DNA actually has the
same kind of effect.
Highly compacted DNA cannot easily be
transcribed.
Now, the other important
player we've talked about, RNA.
More specifically, we'll be talking about
messenger RNA or mRNA.
That plays a major role in translation,
mRNA also has special
regions, it has a start region and a stop
region for translation.
And throughout the mRNA, there are regions
called exons and introns.
And contrary to what the name implies,
Introns are
actaually the regions that are taken out
from the mRNA.
So to think about
the cookbook analogy.
If you have a recipe and there are some
ingredients you may not use simply
because they're not available or you don't
like them, those ingredients would be the
introns.
You remove them and they're not included
in the final meal that you make.
The ingredients that you keep for the
sections of mRNA are going
to be used to make the protein and we call
those again, exons.
mRNA processing can be a player in the
final protein that is synthesized.
By selectively splicing different exons

together we
can create new recipes from that cookbook.
That means when you're using your cookbook
to make a meal, by adding or omitting
certain ingredients in the recipe you can
create slightly different versions of your
dinner tonight.
All of these processes we discussed in
lecture work together to control gene
expression.
So, to summarize.
Physically changing the structure of DNA
through compacting it or altering
methylation patterns reduces gene
expression.
But we can also increase gene expression,
translation, by having
strong motors, enhancer sequences, or the
presence of activator proteins.
Our cells can even splice together
different exons using the same mRNA
template
to create an assortment of different
proteins from the same initial DNA
sequence.
We'll discuss later this week how
environment
can play a role in altering gene
expression
by initiating the release of
neurotransmitters or hormones.
When they bind to a specific receptor,
they activate transcription of certain DNA
sequences.
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