What You Eat Affects Your Genes

purkinje writes "Tiny bits of genetic material, called microRNAs, can make their way from the food you eat into your blood stream, and change how your genes are expressed, according to a new study. A team of Chinese scientists found tiny bits of white rice microRNA floating around in people's blood after a meal. When they looked at what was happening on a cellular level, they found that the microRNAs were changing gene expression, decreasing levels of a receptor that filters out LDL (bad) cholesterol. When the scientists gave mice both rice and a chemical to block the microRNAs, their levels of that receptor returned to normal — showing that the microRNAs weren't just swimming through the blood stream, but acting on genes in the animals' cells."

Re:Truly Remarkable

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

How long has it been since that was actually dogma outside of intro-level stuff(I ask by way of honest inquiry, in case somebody is familiar with the recent history of the field, not rhetorical attack)?

I am given to understand that it was at one point; but friends-of-friends in the university lab scene tell me that, while still considered to be largely ill-understood, the study of epigenetics and other subtle environment/genome interactions was a very hot area, with lots of exploratory work being done.

Re:Truly Remarkable

[ColdWetDog]

It might be your long held dogma, but people in the field have long known about epigenetic changes to DNA and it's implications. We've known about mitochondrial DNA for decades, same with DNA methylation. The microRNAs are fairly new and an open field but it has been realized that the "Central Dogma" (DNA -> RNA -> Protein) has been barking up the wrong tree for some time.

TFA is interesting and rather unexpected. Small, unprotected RNA molecules aren't "supposed" to survive long outside. If this is true, if it can be repeated it might explain some of the more confusing relationships between diet, growth, cancer and other diseases. The nice thing is that this experiment should be 'relatively' easy to replicate (at least from the detail one gets in TFA - they're not using anything all that unique, weird or expensive).

Since it is such a potentially high profile experiment, the cynic in me wonders why it didn't get published in a higher profile journal. Of course, not every important discovery is published in Nature or Science, but one wonders.