Parental biases influence brain

The body's tendency to silence the expression of one parental allele in favor of the other -- a practice known as genomic imprinting -- is much more widespread than scientists have believed, according to a new genome-wide study in mice, published online this week in linkurl:Science.;http://www.sciencemag.org/ The study found that the number of genes in mouse brains with a bias toward either the maternal or paternal allele is thirteen times higher than previously thought.

Kessa Ligerro Wikimedia Commons

"Overall, the results tell us that imprinting is a major mode of epigenetic regulation," said study author linkurl:Catherine Dulac;http://golgi.harvard.edu/faculty/faculty_profile.php?f=catherine-dulac at Harvard University. In addition, she and her colleagues argue that understanding imprinting in the brain may shed light on sex-specific brain diseases. Genomic imprinting is a type of epigenetic regulation, in which chemical reactions cause changes in gene expression without altering the underlying DNA. Over the last ten years, many...