A team of Japanese scientists recently announced that they had successfully implanted a gene into marmosets that made their skin, hair roots and blood glow green under ultraviolet light.

The scientists implanted a jellyfish gene that leads to the creation of a green fluorescent protein into marmoset embryos. When the baby marmosets were born, four of the five that had been implanted carried the gene. Most significantly, one of those eventually fathered a healthy baby that also carried the green fluorescent gene.

Why, you may wonder, would scientists want to make a glowing green monkey? What possible scientific benefit could that provide?

According to the Reuters/Yahoo News article, this is a potentially huge development in genetic research, with special potential for the medical field. It is the first time that a transgene (a gene from another type of organism) has been successfully passed to the offspring of an implanted animal.

“The birth of this transgenic marmoset baby is undoubtedly a milestone,” stem cell expert Dr. Gerald Schatten, of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and Shoukhrat Mitalipov, of Oregon Health and Sciences University, wrote in a commentary in Nature.

“Transgenic marmosets are potentially useful models for research into infectious diseases, immunology and neurological disorders, for example,” they wrote.

The scientists who successfully implanted the gene are focused on using this new information in research on currently incurable diseases such as Parkinsons disease. See the original article here.

This is just another example of the high degree of commonality in the genes of all living things, and especially between humans and primates. It’s also a great illustration of epigenetics - non-DNA memory in genes plays such an important role in how genetic information is expressed or passed along to offspring.

Scientific research confirming and clarifying the importance of epigenetics in biology - specifically, the passing on of traits to offspring - just keeps coming. A recent study published in The Quarterly Review of Biology (University of Chicago) highlighted over 100 examples of specific animal traits passed to offspring via non-DNA inheritance.

A Current.com post includes selected examples from the study, as well as commentary on the conclusions. Here are a few examples:

Fruit flies exposed to certain chemicals transmit changes—bristly outgrowths on their eyes—down at least 13 generations.

Exposing a pregnant rat to a chemical that alters reproductive hormones leads to generations of sick offspring.

People malnourished in adolescence transmit higher rates of heart disease and diabetes to their children and grandchildren.

In these and 97 other cases the changes in subsequent generations were not from changes in DNA but from epigenetics.

According to the Current.com post, the biggest implication of this new research is that “All the stuff we’re synthesizing and creating from plastics to nanomaterials is going to live in our bodies and take its toll down the generations for a long, long time.”

The “glass-half-full’ flipside to this opinion is epigenetic nutrition: we can identify nutrients and specific foods, used by our ancestors, that meet the needs of our present-day bodies.

The LiveScience site has a fantastic overview of epigenetics that was posted about three weeks ago. Epigenetics is a relatively new area of scientific study that has come into focus as a result of the human genome project. As scientists mapped out the genome, they began to see that genes by themselves are not entirely responsible for the growth and development of our bodies. It is the epigenome that helps determine whether a given cell will become part of a big toe, or part of a lung, or what color a person’s eyes will be.

The epigenome doesn’t just affect the body while in the womb, though. According to Liang Liu, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who was quoted in the article, “food, pollution, toxic chemicals (such as those found in hard clear plastics), drugs, stress, even exercise and social interaction can all affect the epigenome and alter its attitude towards DNA.”

A key factor that can influence the epigenome and its effect on our genes is food and proper nutrition. In the article, Randy Jirtle, an epigenetics research pioneer at Duke University in North Carolina, makes this point clear:

Similarly, healthy nutrition and lifestyle choices can positively sway gene expression. “Food is truly medicine when you are talking about epigenetic changes,” Jirtle said…

The epigenome’s malleability highlights the power we can have over the health of ourselves and our children, said Jirtle.

Check out the article here for a great overview of epigenetics, and some of the great health benefits associated with this emerging science.