How Your Dad's Environmental Responses Could Be Impacting Yours—Oliver Rando—Rando Lab, University of Massachusetts Medical School
Finding Genius Podcast
Richard Jacobs
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2020
⏱️ 37 minutes
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Summary
Oliver Rando is a professor and head of the Rando Lab at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He joins the show to discuss his research on epigenetic inheritance.
You'll learn the following:
- How the research being done in Rando's lab has shown that in mouse models, a father's environment can influence some phenotypes in children
- When the first example of epigenetic inheritance was discovered in mammals, and how it adds to the understanding of both Prader-Willi syndrome and Angelman syndrome
- Whether or not the evidence suggests that changes through epigenetic inheritance may be additive in nature or have the ability to be "locked in" after multiple generations are exposed
When data that doesn't belong to the DNA sequence itself affects the phenotype of an organism in some way, and when that phenotypic change is passed on from a parent to a child, epigenetic inheritance is said to occur. It was only two or three decades ago that there was near consensus in the scientific community that epigenetic information could not be passed between generations.
However, a growing number of research studies are now showing that that's simply not the case. One such study is taking place in Oliver Rando's lab, where he and his team are using mouse models to demonstrate that the environmental conditions of a father can impact the phenotype of the father's offspring.
In addition to discussing the details of his research, Rando touches on the nature of some other interesting types of research going on in the area of epigenetic inheritance. He also talks about the limitations and gaps in this type of research, and what he aims to accomplish in the coming years.
Tune in for the full conversation and learn more at https://www.umassmed.edu/randolab/.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Forget frequently asked questions. |
| 0:02.0 | Common sense, common knowledge, or Google. |
| 0:05.0 | How about advice from a real genius? |
| 0:07.0 | 95% of people in any profession are good enough to be qualified and licensed. |
| 0:11.0 | 5% go above and beyond. They become very good at what they do, but only 0.1% are real Jesus. |
| 0:18.0 | Richard Jacobs has made it his life's mission to find them for you. He hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field, |
| 0:25.0 | sleep science, cancer, stem cells, ketogenic diets, and more. Here come the geniuses. |
| 0:30.3 | This is the Finding Genius Podcast that is Richard Jacobs. |
| 0:34.0 | Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius Podcast,, Medicine, and Bioscience Edition. |
| 0:43.7 | That's my job to find geniuses, what I term in all their fields, people that are one in a thousand. |
| 0:50.6 | What I've noticed is 95% of people in most fields are qualified and they're okay and 5% go above and beyond and really 0.1% in a 1,000 are the top people. |
| 1:00.3 | So I think I've got one today. It's Professor Oliver Rando. He goes by |
| 1:04.0 | Ollie Rando. He's at UMass Medical School. We're going to be talking about |
| 1:08.6 | epigenetics and epigenetic inheritance. So Ollie, thanks for coming. |
| 1:13.0 | Thank you for having me. |
| 1:14.0 | Yeah, so tell me, first, just a very brief definition of what epigenetics is to you, |
| 1:19.0 | and then we'll go from there and to your research. |
| 1:22.0 | Yeah, so epigenetic inheritance is the inheritance of information beyond DNA sequence. |
| 1:28.0 | And the easiest way for most people to think about this is by and large every cell in your body has the same DNA you all came |
| 1:35.0 | from one fertilized egg but when a liver cell divides it never makes a kidney |
| 1:38.8 | cell or a skin cell it makes two liver cells so not only do you pass on your genome, the book of instructions, |
| 1:45.3 | but you also pass on state liverness. And so this is an epigenetically heritable state. |
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