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July 21st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
There’s more to inbreeding than dubious genes – how they are “read” matters, too. If a key influence on gene expression is blocked, inbred plants show few signs of their incestuous heritage. The finding may one day help small populations of endangered species breed healthily.
Many organisms carry two copies of each gene, with one member of the pair being dominant. This means individuals can carry a potentially harmful gene whose effect is masked by its normal partner. When two closely related individuals breed, however, their offspring may inherit two copies of the bad gene – one from each parent – and suffer its ill effects, a phenomenon called inbreeding depression.
Philippine Vergeer and her colleagues at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, have discovered that there may be more to the consequences of inbreeding than these genetic doppelgangers.
Inbred but healthy
The team collected wild seed from a common perennial (Scabiosa columbaria) and grew it in the lab. After the plants flowered, the researchers self-pollinated some plants and cross-pollinated others to create inbred and outbred siblings.
Grown under standard conditions, the inbred plants had fewer leaves and less biomass than those that had been outbred. But the team managed to counter these ill effects without altering the plants’ genetic code.
The inbred seeds developed fairly normally if soaked in a solution that stops methyl chemical groups from clamping to DNA. DNA methylation is a kind of “epigenetic modification”, affecting how genes are read, and may be triggered by environmental factors.
“This is the kind of data we have been waiting years for,” says Christian Biémont at the University of Lyon, France, who suggested decades ago that inbreeding’s effects go beyond the genome. “At the time we did not have the techniques to test such hypotheses.”
Save our species
Richard Frankham, a conservation geneticist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, says some epigenetic influence comes as no great surprise. “However, to find that reversing epigenetic effects by chemical treatment completely eliminated inbreeding depression is extremely surprising.”
Many endangered species are inbred. The new study suggests they might reproduce normally with epigenetic treatment.
Deborah Charlesworth at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says there are issues to be overcome, though. “It is very important to be clear what one means by ‘an epigenetic role’,” she says. “Turning genes off and on in development is absolutely distinct from suggesting that these effects are transmitted to the next generation, let alone to future generations” – something that Vergeer’s team has not yet observed.
“It is important not to get ahead of ourselves and assume that we can stop worrying about inbreeding depression,” says Frankham. “If the ‘curing’ effects are lost in the next generation, then the work provides interesting background, but it has very little or no practical application.”
“We are testing this inheritance at the moment,” says Vergeer. “Since heritability of epigenetic modifications has been shown for a number of species, I believe that in general these epigenetic changes in inbreeding depression can play a large role in evolution.”
Journal reference: Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0494
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Doesn’t Make Sense
Fri Jul 13 22:03:40 BST 2012 by Eric Kvaalen
This seems to imply that inbreeding depression is not due to having two copies of a bad allele — or at least not in the case of this plant — because the offspring were surely homozygous for many genes. For some reason,this did not harm them if methylation was prevented. If methylation promotes the gene, it would promote both bad copies. If it inhibits the gene, then it would inhibit both copies and the plant would lack some needed protein.
In other words, the theory does not explain the result.
Why does Vergeer say that heritability of epigenetic modifications has been shown for some species? I thought they could only be passed on for one or two generations. Surely they are not permanent.
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