The Illustrated Guide to Epigenetics. Illustrations by Joe Kloc Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. This month marks the ten-year anniversary of the sequencing of the human genome, that noble achievement underpinning the less noble sales of 23andMe‘s direct-to-consumer genetic tests. To commemorate the scientific occasion, we’ve created an illustrated introduction to one subfield of genetics likely to produce even more dubious novelty science projects someday: epigenetics. What is epigenetics? FIGURE 1: Through a process called mitosis, a single cell (A) splits into two cells (B) with identical genetic information.
FIGURE 2: DNA coils around proteins called histones, forming a nucleosome. How does the epigenome work? FIGURE 3: Methyl groups attach themselves to base pairs of a gene, changing the way the gene is expressed.In these two ways the epigenome controls which genes ultimately get expressed. Where do the different epigenomes come from? The Human Protein Atlas. Mitochondria Research. Cell Biology Animations. Welcome to the Chemical Bonding Center.