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9:30 video Hank & his clone Circus Hank explain the power of epigenetics, which studies the factors that determine how much or whether some genes are expressed in your body.

The following sequence of activities is designed to help your students continue their investigation into how characteristics of living things are passed on from generation to generation. This time we are looking at multifactorial traits and how the genes and environment play a role in the final expression of the trait.

Your ancestors' lousy childhoods or excellent adventures might change your personality, bequeathing anxiety or resilience by altering the epigenetic expressions of genes in the brain.

1:30 A short film about DNA microarrays, and how they are used to show dynamic gene expression levels.

Almost every cell in the human body has the same DNA sequence. So why is a heart cell different from a brain cell? Cells use their DNA code in different ways, depending on their jobs - just as the orchestra in this video can perform one piece of music in many different ways. The combination of changes in gene expression in a cell is called its epigenome

The protagonist of this two-day flipped case study, "Maria," has two problems. She doesn't like it when the apple slices in her lunch turn brown, and she needs to find a project for her biology class that includes molecular biology, preferably one that incorporates plants. Students are enlisted to help Maria understand Arctic Apples™, which don't turn brown because they have been genetically modified to suppress the expression of polyphenol oxidase via RNAi. The case also explores the health, environmental, and safety aspects of growing and eating plants that have been genetically modified to use RNAi. The case applies the central dogma of biology to the creation of genetically modified foods and RNAi and includes a discussion of whether genetically modified foods should be labeled. Several videos are included with the case, including one created by the author specifically for the case. The case is appropriate for use in an introductory level biology or survey level biochemistry course.

The alpha-gal-free pig has one express purpose for now: to develop medical products, like blood thinners, that won't set off adverse reactions.

Sure, we know insufficient serotonin levels get a bad rap when it comes to depression, but that's like blaming one person in a full-scale riot. Depression isn't caused by only one factor. In fact, study co-author Elyse Aurbach says we're probably not getting to the core of why people are depressed because "the brain is immensely complex." In this study, the research team conducted eight experiments (four on animal brains, four on brains of the deceased human kind) of varying sample sizes - from 20 to 90 brains in each - and found that the brains of deceased humans who'd been depressed had increased levels of hippocampal FGF9 and that live animals with increased FGF9 levels demonstrated depressive, anxious behavior. "This is not just a correlation," study leader Huda Akil of the University of Michigan says. Less really may be more, at least when it comes to FGF9.

Explore some examples of specialized plant and animal cells with the Amoeba Sisters! This video explains how specialized cell structure suits their function.

At first, the researchers assumed that genes would shut down shortly after death, like the parts of a car that has run out of gas. What they found instead was that hundreds of genes ramped up. Although most of these genes upped their activity in the first 24 hours after the animals expired and then tapered off, in the fish some genes remained active 4 days after death.

Sometimes, a genetic tweak can make a really big difference in an animal's appearance. That's what likely happened when the predecessors of modern snakes lost their legs, a process that started some 150 million years ago, two separate groups of scientists have discovered. Although the teams took very different approaches to solve the mystery of how those limbs vanished, both came up with similar results: Mutations in DNA located near a gene key to limb formation keep that gene from ever turning on, they report today.

The study is the first to examine all of the gene networks affected by fructose that result in changes to brain function and metabolism-more than 20,000 genes in total. Although the study was conducted using rats, the researchers report that the majority of the sequenced genes are comparable to those in humans, including more than 200 genes in the hippocampus, a brain area crucial to memory, and 700 in the hypothalamus, the seat of the brain's metabolic control center.

Teacher website with great worksheets and links

The behavior of a person's genes doesn't just depend on the genes' DNA sequence - it's also affected by so-called epigenetic factors. Changes in these factors can play a critical role in disease.

2 min video clip showing experimental process

With a dozen or so 140-character dispatches (including three heat maps), Gilad suggested the results published in PNAS were an anomaly-a result of how the tissue samples were sequenced in different batches. If this "batch effect" was eliminated, he proposed, mouse and human tissues clustered in a tissue-specific manner, confirming previous results rather than supporting the conclusions reported by the Mouse ENCODE team.

Explore gene regulation with the Amoeba Sisters, including the fascinating Lac Operon found in bacteria! Learn how genes can be turned "on" and "off" and why this is essential for cellular function.

Vibrio harveyi is a marine bacteria that emits light only at high population density. The bacterial bioluminescence is controlled by a system called quorum sensing. In this system, signaling molecules are secreted, and when they bind to cell surface receptors, they turn on many genes, including those that produce bioluminescence.

Interactive media book with areas to learn, explore, and analyze microarray data