© University of BathGenetic imprinting - genes that are more active when they come from one parent than the other - impacts health at all stages of life.
To understand the importance of imprinted genes to inheritance, we need to step back and ask how inheritance works in general. Most of the thirty trillion cells in a person's body contain genes that come from both their mother and father, with each parent contributing one version of each gene. The unique combination of genes goes part of the way to making an individual unique. Usually, each gene in a pair is equally active or inactive in a given cell. This is not the case for imprinted genes. These genes - which make up less than one percent of the total of 20,000+ genes - tend to be more active (sometimes much more active) in one parental version than the other.
Until now, researchers were aware of around 130 well-documented imprinted genes in the mouse genome - the new additions take this number to over 200. Professor Tony Perry, who led the research from the Department of Biology & Biochemistry at Bath, said: "Imprinting affects an important family of genes, with different implications for health and disease, so the seventy-plus new ones add an important piece of the jigsaw."
Comment: It would appear that it's a similar story for the Monarch butterflies over in the Americas. As noted in Millions of butterflies flying to Scotland in 'once-in-a-decade' phenomenon: See also: