Stripping down science, the naked scientists.

The Naked Scientists. This week David Cameron is expected to announce plans to build a database of the DNA profiles of every British citizen

and to marry this information to their medical records to discover how genes and diseases are linked.

So this week we are unzipping your genes to find out how they're controlled

and also why what a grandmother eats can directly affect the health of her grandchildren.

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Hello, it is Sunday the 9th of December and this is the naked scientist with me Chris Smith and also

with Ginny Smith. In the 1950s James Watson and Francis Crick working at

Cambridge University discovered the structure of DNA.

Made up of just four different bases or letters, A, C, T, G, which are linked together into

long molecules that spell out genetic words or genes, DNA functions a bit like a recipe book which cells use

to cook up the chemicals that they need to function. But different sorts of cells

need to use different genes or recipes to do their different jobs and how this is controlled

is partly down to a process called epigenetics and joining us to explain how this

works is Stephanie Seisenberger from theriam Institute in Cambridge. Hello,

So how does all this work then? Tell us how it works?

As he said, different cells in your body need to take on completely different functions.

And this is all down to which genes are active or inactive in each individual cell.

So each gene has a sort of molecular switch which can turn the gene on off and it's those switches

that we study in epigenetics. When you say switches how do they work what sorts of

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