Random chance may explain hereditary disease
A new study from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet has shown that random chance could determine your risk of hereditary illnesses. It is down to chance whether the gene copy you inherit from your mother or your father is one which may cause disease.
The research may explain why an illness only afflicts some individuals even if they are carrying the same gene copy as their healthy relatives. There are two copies of each gene in our body, one inherited from the mother and one from the father. Most studies conducted in this field have shown that both gene copies are used to the same extent.
Scientists have now been able to show that gene activity is more dynamic and unpredictable than previously thought. There is often only one randomly chosen gene copy active in each individual cell. Which gene copy is active may also change over time.
Study leader Dr Rickard Sandberg said: “This dynamic phenomenon inside cells has not previously been described, as the methods for studying gene activity have been based on analysing hundreds to thousands of cells at a time. This gives you an average, where the contribution of the copies from the father and mother of the same gene, known as the alleles, are mixed together. We have instead developed a method that allows us to analyse the gene activity in individual cells, which enabled this discovery.”
The discovery casts new light on many issues in biomedical research, according to Sandberg. For example, the discovery could help explain how apparent differences can arise in identical twins, despite having nearly identical genes.
The research was financed using grants from the European Research Council, the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research and the Åke Wiberg Foundation. It was presented in the journal Science.
