Why tortoiseshell cats are always female.Why you can’t make a baby from two sperm or two eggs, but have to have one of each.How queen bees and ant queens control their colonies.This book will also explore and explain the following topics: We can pinpoint the tiny changes to DNA that control all the fine details of how our bodies behave.Īnd epigenetics doesn’t just govern the identity of the cells in out body. Now is the perfect time for such a book – not only do we know many examples of epigenetics in action, we’re finally starting to understand the mechanisms of how it works. It’s the fastest moving field in modern biology, yet very little has been written on this for a general readership. When biologists see an example of this they call it epigenetics. The same script can result in different productions. That’s what happens when cells read the genetic code that’s in DNA. Identical starting points, different outcomes. Both productions used Shakespeare’s script, yet the two movies are entirely different. Sixty years later Baz Luhrmann directed Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in another movie version of this play.

In 1936 George Cukor directed Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer in a film version. In the factory, molten metal or plastic gets poured into the mould thousands of times and, unless something goes wrong in the process, out pop thousands of identical car parts.īut DNA isn’t really like that. We talk about DNA as if it’s a template, like a mould for a car part in a factory.

Sometimes, when you read about biology, you could be forgiven for thinking that those three letters explain everything. How can one blueprint lead to so many different final structures?ĭNA. Each cell in your body carries exactly the same genetic code, and yet you don’t have teeth growing out of your eyeballs and you never get toenails coming out of your liver. Every time you look in the mirror you see a mystery of biology.

The epigenetics revolution