Connection Between Epigenome, Selective Mutability, Evolution, and Human Disease
Li, Harris et al., PLoS Genetics
Researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine and elsewhere propose a "connection between the epigenome, selective mutability, evolution, and human disease" based on the findings of their study on associations of structural mutability with germline DNA methylation and with non-allelic homologous recombination mediated by low-copy repeats. "Combined evidence from four human sperm methylome maps, human genome evolution, structural polymorphisms in the human population, and previous genomic and disease studies consistently points to a strong association of germline hypomethylation and genomic instability," the Baylor-led team writes.
Entangled DNA
Some physicists are suggesting that quantum entanglement — "the weird quantum process in which a single wavefunction describes two separate objects" — holds DNA together, reports the Physics arXiv Blog. The National University of Singapore's Elisabeth Rieper and her colleagues developed a simple model of DNA in which the four bases are planar, positively charged nuclei surrounded by electron clouds and movement of those clouds relative to the nuclei create dipoles, and if they moves back and forth, a harmonic oscillation. According to the Physics arXiv Blog Rieper's team then asks, "what happens to these oscillations … when the base pairs are stacked in a double helix?" A classical physics accounting of the energy holding DNA together, Rieper's team says, isn't enough as it is "energetically less favourable than the quantum correlations" and so they turned to quantum entanglement as a possible explanation. This work is "speculative but potentially explosive," adds the Physics arXiv Blog.