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Published online 15 November 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2007.250
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When only mum or dad matters
Hundreds of our genes turn on just one copy, rather than both.
The textbook rule that says activated human genes almost always express both of their copies — the one inherited from mum and that inherited from dad — seems not to be true. Instead, a good chunk of our genome could prefer the 'single life', according to new research.
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Does this differ from imprinted gene expression in that, in imprinted gene expression, all the cells of a tissue express either the maternal or the paternal copy of the specific gene, whereas here the different cells within a tissue make a random choice to express one of other copy, and thus both copies are expressed throughout the tissue?
This is distinct from imprinting, which I referred to as a "chemical flag." An individual's cells could express the maternal or paternal allele -- or both. But daughter cells seem to make the same decision, at least in a Petri dish. The researchers speculate that this could lead to patches of clonal tissue, each with distinct gene expression patterns. I hope we'll see a lot of follow-up on this paper.
Interesting. Is it possible that the same happens for the gene copy number, in a sense that Copy Number Variation could occur between distinct cells in the same organism? How relevant is the switch between the maternal/paternal alleles during development? We must definitely, as in the X chromosome inactivation dig deeper into the logistics of this process.