An Exploration of Epigenetic Inheritance—Dr. Qi Chen, PhD—Assistant Professor, Biomedical Sciences at UC Riverside

Finding Genius Podcast

Richard Jacobs

Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.4 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2019

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Inheritance is a fundamental feature of life, allowing organisms to pass traits onto their offspring. It's well known that DNA is the carrier for this hereditary information, but for a long time it was believed to be the only carrier. Over the past several decades, new and evolving research on epigenetics—the method by which the environment has the ability to change genetic expression—has emerged, and most recently, this research has focused on epigenetic inheritance in humans. Dr. Qi Chen, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences at the University of California, Riverside is studying sperm RNA and how its function may be related to environmental exposure and epigenetics in humans. Dr. Chen shares a number of fascinating insights from his lab and recent experiments, while pulling from decades' worth of knowledge on the topics at issue.

On today's episode, you will learn:

What happens when the RNA of a mouse exposed to a high-fat diet is extracted and implanted into a healthy zygote
How the discovery of a subset of tRNA-derived small RNAs (tsRNA) in the mature sperm of mice might have important implications for epigenetic inheritance in humans
How sperm RNA changes in response to environmental stimuli

Tune in for all the details and check out http://qichen-lab.info/people.html to learn more.

Transcript

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0:58.0	Thank you. Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Future Tech and Future Tech Health
1:08.4	podcast. I have Dr. Chee Chen, is an assistant professor of
1:12.2	Biomedical Sciences at University of California Riverside.
1:15.8	We'd be talking about epigenetics and specifically when is epigenetics changes heritable to the next generation which is a really cool topic.
1:26.0	So, T. Thank you for coming.
1:28.0	Thank you, Richard, for inviting me.
1:30.0	Yeah, so just basically for listeners, so can you describe what epigenetics is and then we'll dive in?
1:36.3	Oh my gosh, so the first question is what epigenetic is? That is quite a big one, but perhaps, let's start from the very basic, what that is the fundamental features for life
	...

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