 It's time to get started, so take a seat. It's the Science Cafe brought to you by... As soon as that UMass Amherst in biology, I'm trying to share with the community cool things about science. So we have here a professional, an expert in epigenetics, Dana. To help everybody understand the concept a little bit better, maybe share some exciting epigenetic facts with everybody. So we do this once a month. The next one will be November 8th. Those are our funding sources, by the way, that make this possible. So thank them. And if you want to do the Science After Dark fun after the semester meeting, where we bring all everyone back, the donations are in the back room. So, welcome. That's making it a life. You haven't missed any science, don't worry. So, nice to graduate a cylinder in the back. And only if you're comfortable, donate. But that's where the year celebration 2 will happen. And we're going to invite all of the speakers from the year. So if you want to continue the conversation, please join us then. Please join us after this cafe as well. Ask questions at the five-minute question intervals, where we invite everyone to clarify any concepts that you might have been confused about, or any fun ideas that you had that maybe Dana would know something about. So she'll talk for 15 minutes, and then there'll be five minutes. And then that will happen three times tonight. So, yeah. There's a sign-up sheet that's in the back. Please sign up. It'll be passed around. It will be passed around. Leon's supporting it right now. And that's important so that we know who's here, so that we can get your email on the list, and that you can know when the next one's happening, November 8th. The next one's going to be really exciting, by the way, because we're going to do a fermented food festival afterwards. So stick around. Afterwards, we're going to have a few vendors from the area, and some samples for you guys to enjoy. And they're going to talk about the science behind how they ferment their food, and it should be really interesting. So that will happen after next week's cafe. Come on. Next month's cafe. A little ambitious there. Okay, so please put down your science cafe suggestions also on the sign-up sheet so that we are actually talking about things that you guys are interested in, because epigenetics are really cool, and we think you guys might want to hear about it. So, anyways, without further ado, give us feedback and suggestions for next month. But this week, we are talking about epigenetics, and that is how the environment impacts and interacts with our genes to determine our personal qualities. So the first question would be, what is a gene? Yeah, absolutely. So what is a gene? It's one of those sort of deceptively simple questions. Everyone thinks they have a good idea of what it is until they actually get asked and put on the spot. So the way that I define a gene is a portion of DNA that tends to be inherited together. So we can think about genes as coding for a protein, and for the most part that's true, but there are also other types of genes that don't necessarily code for proteins. But yeah, that's the general idea. It's a portion of DNA that tends to get inherited together and does something. So how is it inherited? Yeah, so there's contributions from your mom and your dad during fertilization. During meiosis, you produce gametes that have half the DNA of a normal adult's health, and those two gametes come together, refuse during fertilization, and you have contributions from your mom and from your dad. And during that process of producing gametes during meiosis, you can actually have recombination and crossing over the shuffles of the genetic deck a little bit and get some things happening, and that'll be important later on. So I'm going to make a note of it now. Yeah, I think if that was confusing at all, we'll clarify it. Another thing that we might want to know is what a phenotype is. Yeah, and so a phenotype as opposed to being the genetic contribution of what makes you view, your phenotype is your physical or behavioral traits that make up who you are and what you look like and how you act. So, you know, you can think about a phenotype being, for example, your hair color or the shape of your nose. Those are some physical phenotypes, some morphological phenotypes. I also include behavior as a phenotype, which again isn't something that everyone always does, but that's the way that my lab thinks about it. It's the way that I'm used to thinking about it. And so your phenotype is influenced to one degree or another by your genes, right? So that's, you know, how those things, at least from the beginning, start to interact. All right, so to bring it back to something that a lot of us probably have been experiencing recently, you probably have heard of 23andMe, that's getting really big right now. And a lot of people have been getting their genetics tested to find out, oh, I have the gene that means I could be athletic or I could be really strong. And is there a role for the environment versus genes in these phenotypes? Yeah, absolutely. I don't like to think about it as, you know, nature or nurture. I think about it as nature and nurture. Most of your traits are going to be determined by a combination of both genetic and environmental influences. So the way I can kind of illustrate this is with an example, which is muscle development, like I've already alluded to. So here you have four different animals that all share a mutation in a myostatin gene. Myostatin is a really important gene, obviously, for muscle development. And so mutating it can lead to overproduction of muscle, like you see in these four animals. And this mutation is actually evident really early on in development. Perhaps from those two bulls would actually show basically two times the muscle fibers and higher birth weights than their, you know, unmutated siblings. So this clearly is a gene that has a very heavy impact on the phenotype. But other genes for muscle development don't have quite such a clear impact on the phenotype. And in fact it rely much more heavily on the environment, in that case sort of your workout regimen, right? And for a lot of animals, not humans necessarily, but for a lot of animals, your workout regimen is determined by how many predators you're experiencing in your environment. How often do you have to run away? And so your environment in that situation is going to matter a lot. And so for example, if you have two bodybuilders have a baby together, it's not necessarily that the baby's going to be totally jacked at birth. It's that baby probably has a higher potential of creating that kind of muscle mass over its development. So how is it possible that an environmental factor could influence a phenotype? Yeah, so, sorry, I forgot to put on my jacket. So, yeah, the mechanistic side of things, how does it actually happen? We don't always know, but we have a couple of examples that we have worked out really well. So for example, we have these mice. So the yellow mouse carries a mutation and it's a goody gene. And if you breed together two of those yellow mice, chances are you're going to get another fat yellow mouse. And so the goody gene carries with it this ravenous appetite that leads to being overweight. It also leads to these mice being prone to cancer and diabetes. And again, if you cross two of these things together, if you make them together, they're almost always going to give you a mouse that looks exactly like them. The exception to that is actually the brown mouse on the right. That brown mouse had a mom that looked like, mom and a dad that looked like that yellow mouse. But its mother was fed something quite different from the other yellow mice. And so by changing mom's diet, we actually drastically changed the phenotype of the baby. And so the diet that we gave it, not me, but researchers gave it, was very rich in methyl groups. And methylation is what we typically lately have thought about when we talk about epigenetics, is this ability to turn off or on genes based on environmental factors, like how many methyl groups you encounter. So methyl groups can attach to a gene and actually turn off its expression, and that's what happened here is the methyl groups in the mom's diet attach to the baby's genes and actually let it grow up somewhat normal. And so where can we find methyl groups in genes like onions, beets, and garlic? And also actually the supplements that we give to the mom. And so these researchers also found that the percentage of how much methyl groups were in the diet actually led to a spectrum of phenotypes. And so giving it a completely methylated diet would lead to a brown mouse, and giving it completely un-methylated would lead to a yellow mouse, but there was actually a complete spectrum in between. So that's one example of a really well worked out mechanism for how these kinds of changes, how these kinds of environmental influences change the phenotype. So would that mean that we're more susceptible to environmental influence when we're young? I think everything's a little bit squishier when you're young. But I think that it's also really important to reiterate that these kinds of changes can carry out throughout the course of your life. So adults can be susceptible to these kinds of changes as well. But when you're young, the pace of development is so much faster, and so many more things are going on in terms of maturity and patterning of how you're going to end up looking as an adult, that yeah, I think we're a little bit more susceptible when we're young but not completely unsusceptible when we're older. We got a wild question now. Does this mean that there's anything such as free will or is everything determined by your genes? Your genes and your environment. I love to impress all my students that science and philosophy are super intertwined. You really wouldn't have modern scientific enterprise without philosophy. And so I love this question because it brings us back to those roots. But honestly, I don't know if we have free will or just the appearance of it because we don't know all of the causal factors. But I think that even if we could perfectly predict the function of every gene and every environment and every genetic background, so that it is like the influence of other genes on that gene's function, even if we had that, I still think there's a role for chance and I still think there's a role for something other than those factors. But our chance of free will really the same thing. I honestly can't tell you that's not my area of expertise. And thank goodness we don't know everything because that gives us a job. All right, does anybody have questions about this first section? Turn into a yellow mouse by changing its diet. No, usually methylation is pretty permanent as far as I know. And those changes will actually carry on throughout subsequent generations as well. So the brown mouse will not give birth to a yellow mouse no matter what its diet is. Yeah, great question. Any other questions? Yeah. So are methyl groups common in people's diets? Yeah. So there are a lot of restrictions on women's diets when they're pregnant. Does that have anything to do with some of those effects? Oh boy. I'm sorry. I don't like telling you what to do. But I'm not going to touch that. Okay. Yeah. So you said a brown mouse won't be able to give birth to a yellow mouse no matter what it eats. Why is it that it can go in one direction but it can't go in the other direction? Yeah, methyl groups, what they do is they block the machinery of turning the gene into a protein from actually accessing the gene. And so once it's blocked, it's pretty well blocked. And those kinds of things can last for several generations. I don't know exactly when it begins to wear out. I think it does eventually, but at least in the short term that's a permanent thing. Do we have one more question? Yeah. So were you trying to say that the brown mouse isn't affected by its diet? It's affected by what is imperative because of the parents diet? Yeah. I think we have time for one more example if you want to. Yeah, I forgot about Daphna. What my lab likes to call fish food. Daphna are little water fleas. So they live in a water column and like some things like that. And what I'm showing you here are two different species. Daphna, they're marked at the bottom. And within each species, those are genetically identical clones. So there is no genetic difference between those two very different looking animals. And the only difference is whether they were raised in an environment with cues from predators. And so if you have cues from a predator, you look like this guy on the left. You have spines and a helmet, things that make you able to survive predators. If you're on the right, you were raised in an environment with no predators and you don't produce those structures. So again, that's one where we have the mechanism fairly well worked out where we at least know that it's these chemical cues coming off of the predators that induce that response. If that makes sense, we'll move on to the next topic. We want to know what plasticity is. Yeah, so a lot of these things that we've been talking about are plastic responses. And certainly this Daphna response is a plastic response where you have a single genotype that is able to give rise to multiple phenotypes just based on what environment it's raised on. This is a really easy case where there's just two phenotypes, one or the other. It's a binary switch. My lab's more interested in things that are continuous. And so, yeah, I'll leave it there actually. Alright, then how do we measure it? Yeah, we measure it using something called a reaction law. So I think that's the next slide. Yeah, absolutely. So again, here you have two different environments. And you have your trait on the y-axis and your environments on the x. And in one environment, your trait looks this way. And in the other environment, you have a different trait value. And so that to us is a plastic response and a pretty drastic one. The alternative rate is that you have no plastic response and you look the same no matter what environment you're raised in. And so our lab was really interested in how you go from those two states. Can you become more plastic or less plastic? And what are the genes that allow you to become more plastic or less plastic? So there's no doubt in here. This is just a hypothetical. Yeah, this is a hypothetical. Let us understand. But then why is this important? Why is this important? Because plasticity is really useful if you're encountering a novel environment. So if you're moving into a new place where you don't know what the environment is going to be, the ability to look either way can actually be quite useful because it can allow you to survive that novel condition. Similarly, if you have a stable but fluctuating environment, so something like a seasonal change that occurs over and over again predictably, being plastic can allow you to get through that seasonal change without too much trouble. So for example, you can think about your pet every winter. It grows a new coat and that enables it to be warm throughout the winter and then it sheds that coat in the summer because it doesn't need that heat capacity. So it sounds like plasticity is a really awesome thing. It's good for us. Yeah, it can be. Absolutely. Are there costs to being plastic? Of course there are. They would all be perfectly plastic for everything and we're not. So the cost for being plastic involved, we think things like the time and effort and resources it takes to build the structures that enable us to be plastic, to build the structures that sense the environment, to build the actual structures. Once you have sensed the environment and know that you need to build a new structure, like the Daphne example I was giving you, if there's no need to build that structure, why waste the calcium or why waste the resources on it? So yeah, that's kind of the idea for what's costly about plasticity. Do we have data to support that a little bit? It's one of those things that's kind of hard to test, but there is an experiment with snails where plastic snails had a lower growth rate than non-plastic snails. A growth rate? Growth rate. Yeah, they were slower growing. So then are all organisms equally plastic if there's like a sweet spot? No, not all organisms are equally plastic, and that's actually sort of the driving factor behind the research that I've been doing is that we have two species of fish, because that's my lab studies. I forgot that those videos aren't going to play if I don't press play. Yeah, great. Our audience volunteer. So the environmental factor that we're interested in is the diet that they're eating, and actually it's not so much what their diet consists of, but how it's presented to them. So these fish are benthic. These guys are eating off of rocks off of the benthic substrate at the bottom of the lake. And so, yeah, that puts a different environment than if they're swimming around in the water column, eating things out of the water column, sort of hunting and chasing down prey in the water column. And so those guys are plastic. Yeah, benthic and plastic is just the different way of eating, if you're eating off of rocks or if you're eating from the water column. And so actually the two sets of fish that you're looking at here are the exact same species. They're just changing their behavior based on what environment they're encountering. And those behavioral changes come along with a suite of morphological changes, and we can see that here. So the ones that are plastic are on the bottom, and they're changing the slope of their face. They're changing some things about their jaws and the way that their face is shaped based on what they're eating. The guys up top aren't actually changing at all. You can put them in either environment and they're not going to do, they're going to behave differently, but they're not going to change their shape at all. And that's because they're different species. They are different species, yeah. And they're not choosing to change though, right? No, we're forcing them into it. The environmental influence? Exactly. Those are my questions. So do you guys have questions? So are those sorts of characteristics inheritable? Because it seems like this is sort of like a way to sort of fast forward evolution. Yeah. But we used to say, oh, giraffes have a long neck because they stretched over the years from reaching for the trees. Right. No, the short necked giraffes die. So that's a species evolving over a long time. And this sounds like it's sort of like a way of speeding that up within one generation. It absolutely is. And that's one of the benefits to plasticity, right? Is that it allows you to get to change within a single generation, as opposed to waiting for evolution. But the nice thing about plasticity is because it's also inheritable because things that are plastic, there's a heritable component to that plasticity, it can actually lead to evolution in long term as well. And we think that's happening at the same time. Yeah. Like evolution gets all the credit, and somebody even knows about this. Evolution has traditionally gotten all the credit. At least the last couple hundred years. Yeah, exactly. And honestly, there's a big conversation happening in my field right now about how important are these epigenetic factors to evolution. And you know what side I come down on. And that's why we have the cafe because it is important. And we got to get the word out. Yeah. That is a great question. I suspect, we haven't actually done it, but I suspect that the ones that are changing would change back. And the ones that aren't changing morphologically obviously aren't going to do anything. Behaviorally, they will switch between the two. Yeah. It just depends on what they're seeing. Believe it or not, fish are pretty smart. So are there any genetic differences between these two, the benthic and the plodgic? Between the benthic and the plodgic, no. So within a species, the genetic background is about the same. So what's different? So the environment's different than what's changing. Like I guess I'm confused about what the mechanism is that causes those changes, that the genes are the same. Well, so within your body you have things that sense your environment. And so that's what we're talking about. It's up-regulating some genes and down-regulating other genes based on what you're encountering in your environment. But they have the same genes. They have the same potential basically. Yeah. Do you have any sense of scale? Are there 10,000 epigenetics sites that can be triggered by different primal factors? Species would have two or three, essentially. That is a great question. I can tell you that at least in the research that we've been doing, we keep getting one hit coming up over and over again. But we do have other hits as well. So I would say it's more than two or three, but less than 10,000. You know what I mean? 10,000. Right. Yeah. So these days you have a lot of microbiome-related stuff happening. So in humans you have all kinds of, you have the gut microbiome. You have hair microbiome. Skin. Yeah. Skin every day. So with, and they say for, I forget, for every human gene you have some end bacterial genes. But would the bacteria be, would their genes be affecting the human genes at a genetic level, or do you think they're more like the environment? Yeah. Oh boy. You love getting me out of my comfort zone. I honestly don't know. I think my pun intended, my gut is telling me that it's probably a combination of the two, that it's not one or the other. Yeah. That's the best answer. I'm not a microbiome person by any stretch of the imagination. I think it's cool, but I don't know much about it. All right. So now let's talk about something you do know then. We talked about plasticity. We talked about genes. And we've got this model graph that you showed before. So what role do genes actually play in plasticity? Yeah. So like I was talking about, not all organisms are equally plastic. So we know based on that, that plasticity has evolved the same way that other traits have evolved. And if it's involved, there's a heritable component to it. There's probably a gene behind it. And my lab set out a long time before I ever joined GLAP to find those genes. And so that's kind of been the basis of what we've been doing in our lab for the past probably decades or so. So what is that? I mean, if there's a heritable component, what does it look like? Yeah. We didn't really know. And so we set out to find it. And so this is where things get, we're going to go back to that recombination idea from before. So if you take two parents that look different and you mate them together and you produce offspring, they're going to have an intermediate genotype and probably an intermediate phenotype. And if you cross those guys together, so you mate siblings from that first generation, and you cross those guys together, you can take a look at all of those hybrids. And because of recombination, bits of mom's genome is going to be stuck up next to dad's genome. You're shuffling the deck basically. And the idea between what we do in our lab is we actually go through and we scan the genome at multiple places and say, okay, what's your phenotype? If you're an individual, what's your phenotype? And then are there any places where there's a strong association between the genotype and the phenotype, where if you have two contributions from your mom, you look like your mom, and if you have two contributions from your dad, you look like your dad, and if you're intermediate, you're intermediate. And so, lucky for us, we did find such a place, such a place both in this hypothetical example and in the real world data that my lab has collected. And so for us, that's a place where we think, okay, there's likely a gene here that's controlling whatever trait we're looking at. And in our case, it's that ability to be plastic. So that's all correlative. We actually wanted to be able to go in and test for that gene's involvement, and that's where sort of my piece of the puzzle came in. All right, so you found, you managed to find it. Yeah. How did you test its involvement and plasticity? Yeah, so what I did was I actually went in, and what we were looking at was specifically bones and skeletal structures. And so we went in and we wanted to look at how much bone was being deposited and given amount of time. And so what we did is this really slick technique. First, we took our fish, they were siblings. We split them into their various treatments, like I talked about before, the two different diets. And then after we gave them some time to acclimate, we actually injected them with a dye, like a red dye right here. We waited some amount of time for them to be remodeling their bone and doing their thing. We injected them with another color dye, so we injected them with a green dye. We let them grow out from the week or so and then we sacrificed them. How do you inject a fish? Oh, it's much difficult to eat. No, you put them to sleep first. They're totally out, they don't feel the pain. They just, you kind of put them belly up in a sponge. And you take a syringe and you just kind of, like a medical syringe, just sterilize it kind of thing and just inject them with the dye through their stomach. So it then gets absorbed up into their bones from there. So after we sacrificed them, we dissected off some of the bones, and the one in particular that I'm going to be talking about is sort of this interopical that's shaded in blue right there. This what? It's called the interopical, but basically it's just one of the bones in your face that determines, you know, how well you can eat different diets. And so then because of the way that this dye works, I had to actually dissect off all the soft tissue and everything. And then I took some images and you can see there's really nice labels, red and green, and that gave me the ability to count how much, or measure how much bone was deposited during the course of the experiment. So I did this for each treatment, and then I compared the treatments, and I got those same reaction arms that we were looking at before. So in one environment, the species has one trade value, and in the other environment, the species has another trade value. Then I looked at a second species, and we don't actually see a significant difference between the trades, sorry, between the environments. So that reaction flattens back out, which looks a lot like the hypothetical. An example that I gave at the beginning. So you injected both of them the same way, and the only difference is the time, so the green just happened later? Well, no, actually. So the only difference is the diet. So how much bone they were putting down depended on which diet they were in. And so they were actually, given the exact same amount of time, they were sacrificed on the same day, and the experiment started on the same day. It was just, you know, were they depositing more bone or less bone in a given environment? And for one species, it changed how much bone it was depositing based on the environment it was in. And in the other one, it wasn't plastic. It didn't change how much bone it was depositing. Yeah, I just meant between the red and the green. It should have been more specific. Yeah, but the red... Yeah. Did anybody else have questions about that? Actually, yeah. So why exactly were you interested in seeing the time lapse of the bone deposition? Like, what was the point of the lapse? So it's not so much about the time. The time was just we were giving them time to actually eat the different diets and then change their shape based on that. So that's why we gave them the time to grow up. And so the whole idea here is that, you know, they're constantly depositing bone and putting down bone based on what they're eating. And one species changed how fast it was depositing bone based on what environment it was in and the other species did not. Did that make more sense? Yeah. So, wait, did you have a question? Nope. Sorry? Sorry, just the creative moment, like the new staff bag. Some of them threw a lot of it, and then the others. Yeah, exactly. Yup. All right. I think we're on the same page now. All right. So, what does that mean? All that really tells us this is exactly what we knew at the beginning is that these two species have different amounts of plasticity. One of them is very plastic. One of them is not very plastic. But they're also different at that gene that I was talking about. And what we wanted to do from there was actually go in and really test that gene and say, okay, well, all of this is correlative. But can we actually show that this gene causes a change in the amount of, you know, the amount that they're changing between the environments? And so that's the next step of the experiment. And we did the exact same thing in a different type of fish that's more genetically tractable. And what we saw here is, again, in the ones we didn't do anything to, there was a plastic response. When we actually knocked down that gene, that plastic response went away. And when we knocked up that gene, that plastic response got way more drastic. What's knock-down and knock-up gene? Yeah. Knock-down means we basically didn't let it be expressed. It still existed, but it wasn't turned on as much as it was in the other fish. And knock-up is the reverse where it's more turned on. What could the definition be because of a change in what they were eating or it was you made sure they were eating the same thing? They were eating the same, and actually their growth rates were the same. So they were growing the same. They were just changing how much bone they were depositing in their face. Yeah. And that was based on just the quantity in increase in diet? Just the change in the way that the diet was presented to them. So it wasn't quantity. They were giving the exact same amount of food and the exact same composition of food. Just whether it was put on a rock or sprinkled for them to suck out of the water column. Yeah. So how hard was it to target the gene when it turned on? I actually didn't have to do any of that because zebrafish, there is a whole host of people, we were talking about this earlier, there's a whole host of people who love to make weird zebrafish mutants and we just bought it. Huh? The internet. There are also regulations about that. Okay. Even if you're really interested, I don't think you can just buy one. But because we're a research lab with a legitimate purpose we are able to buy these things out. Just to clarify. Is there any way to present a fish with the habitat that's intermediate between pelagic and mentha so you can test the hypothesis where those are really straight lines? Connect them. I mean is that a reasonable assumption? I mean it could be doing anything with the pelagic and mentha but it doesn't have to be a straight line. I mean, yeah, it doesn't have to be a straight line. That's true. We have given them a choice between the two diets before and we haven't really done much with that data at this point and it does exist out in the Albertson lab space somewhere. There is a bunch of fish that were given the option of either being mentha or pelagic but we haven't really done much with anything in between necessarily. So these are just based on theory that it should be a straight line? Yeah. I just wondered if that gene and that plasticity is conserved across amphibians and reptiles and mammals and if there are implications for osteoporosis in the work that you're doing? Yeah, there are implications for osteoporosis. One of the other genes that we found that's related to this plastic response that we've had a lot with yet is a cilia mutant and so cilia is ciliopathies or bone degenerative kind of things so I haven't gotten too too much into that but it's definitely a direction that the lab is taking. What about stuff that's super reversible and male will like camouflageing or something like that? Is that considered plasticity or is it since it's not really genetic changes I don't really know how is camouflage in that type of thing? Yeah, that's a great question. I consider it to be plasticity I delineate between reversible and irreversible and all that kind of thing but I all see it under the umbrella of plasticity I'm going to answer your question. Is there a main difference? I'm just thinking about the mechanisms there's the it's an octopus that's changing color it's not really changing its genes or anything in that moment it's not expressing anything differently but it's still drastically changing its phenotype Is there like what's the I think that's a fair difference is that is it up-regulating or down-regulating genes? No, well it's a slightly different form of plasticity but I suspect it's plasticity Okay Do we know specifically what modality of the new behavior that it's triggering plasticity so for example if an animal is feeding from the rock is it scraping its face against the rock that's what's triggered or just visual? No exactly it's pressing its face up against the rock and that's causing it to cause it more bone because it's kind of smooshed up against there So back to osteoporosis Oh my If you suddenly were told you had osteoporosis how would you start eating your meals? I would tax in my doctor Yeah, just don't eat on rocks Yeah Yeah, I'm not particularly up on the medical literature so I personally don't know how I would handle that situation but definitely start talking in your position Alright, so we have a big ultimate takeaway what is the actual meaning? What's my takeaway from this is that there are genes that control our ability to be plastic plasticity takes a variety of forms but it's usually important to an animal's survival and our ability to find and manipulate the genes that enable us to be plastic is interesting and novel and something that we haven't done before really so we can manipulate stuff we can totally we can find it we can manipulate it it's pretty cool Does anybody else have questions about it? I kind of deviated from the format because I thought this was interesting but you can now ask anything about what was discussed Yeah plastic What's an example of a human plastic trait? Yeah Absolutely, humans are totally plastic So it's a different way to the research that I've been doing different kinds of athletes remodel their bones differently and we can find those markers if you've ever watched the show Bones you know that there's a lot about markers for different activities is this person a dancer and you can actually see that reflected on their bones and their muscles more than being physically plastic like that morphologically plastic, I think humans are incredibly behaviorally plastic to go back to another example I brought up earlier your dog or your cat shedding its coat we don't shed our coats, we put on jackets or take them off based on how hot or cold we are so we're not changing our traits but we are changing our behavior in response to environmental stimuli I have two questions that are related Okay, so the first question in this gene that you found that controls plasticity in a morphological trait it was nice that there was like one gene that would do that for plasticity in many other things that organisms do whether it's like physiological morphological behavioral it's probably not always just one gene that's controlling plasticity I'm guessing, right? Yeah, probably not So if we were to manipulate it is it basically only as easy as like how complex that control is? Oh boy So one of the things I'm going to talk to you about is that this gene has come up in a couple of different traits all related to this diet and so I think there's probably suites of traits that are controlled by one or a few loci one or a few genes but yeah I don't think we know enough about the genes that make up plasticity or really no Okay, and then my other question so I work on fish and climate change and so like everything is changing really fast right now and one of the big questions is like are animals going to be able to adapt to climate change fast enough? So if we find that there's some recognizable gene that helps an animal be more plastic dealing with temperature and we can potentially manipulate it like do you think that would actually work? I don't know but I think it's worth a shot Yeah, one of the things that is scary about climate change right is that it's happening really fast and our organisms going to be able to evolve fast enough and plasticity like we talked about earlier can help circumvent some of that but the extent to which you can get around it and the extent to which we can know enough in time to actually be able to help I don't know People like are animals like a fish that grows faster be able to change faster than all the other organisms? I don't think you know everything is kind of a compromise between a lot of different things and so if you had one thing that was growing faster than everything else it was going to completely dominate that environment and we don't see that in real life very much so Yeah Maybe I should understand this but I don't Is it just that you were looking at that bone in the jaw that it laid down more calcium or would you have found that in the tail bone as well that it was the fish that was more plastic was laying down more calcium? So it was laying down more bone not necessarily more calcium I want to be careful about that but we looked only at things in the jaws Because then that changes the thought a little bit on osteoporosis it seems to lead more to stressing your bones that will help delay osteoporosis as opposed to just this one look at plasticity Right and I will say that I lied a little bit we did look at their scales because that was really good internal control that we don't think their scales should be changing based on what environment they're in and what we found is actually that they were similar across the environments no matter which species we were talking about so there was a little bit of that where it's localized to the face more so than anything else Yeah One question I have is the relationship between like being able to pass the gene down and plasticity so like the camouflages the octopus or whatever how is that like the fish that they pass that to the next generation? So the idea with plasticity is that plastic fish will have offspring that are plastic and non-plastic fish will have offspring that are not plastic does that answer your question? Oh so the actual ability is Right So is it like they pass down their plasticity but then the child gets to choose to be plastic in a different way? Yeah exactly Those that are talking about plasticity will like go to fixation like if that if generation after generation of those fish were in the end of the world for this thing that would stop being plastic where it wouldn't be able to go back the other way That's the idea it's hard to prove that totally but there's a whole set of research called the flexible stem model of evolution that is that idea exactly Yeah So you would consider that a mediation at some point of an organisms life is could be a kind of plasticity for the new environment for instance having a mediation that is hard to undo and compared to let's say the same adaptation that would occur for something like microRNAs that would interfere with the gene expression Yeah I think mediation is kind of its own I don't know that it fits under the category of plasticity to be totally honest I'd have to think more about that but yeah does that answer your question a little bit Do you know if because they're laying down the bone in the jaw at certain places is there bone that's being taken away or deprived of in other like in the other jaw bones or elsewhere in the body I don't think so Okay sorry follow up then Do you know if there's any more like absorption of calcium or other nutrients that are required for bone formation in the benthic or is the phalagic to be able to lay that down We haven't looked at it specifically yet but that's a great question Yeah I have a quick question on the can you use some kind of quantification of the number of methyl groups in a particular area or can you build it like a methylone to predict I'm pretty sure people are trying to do that right now Yeah not me Talk about butterflies or something Give us another example I want to thank Dina not only for this wonderful science cafe but also for being a previous science cafe president not all of you probably know that she has led this organization to be as fruitful as it currently is so we really appreciate her and all of her contributions to science cafe those are making me blush and we want to wish her good luck and good science in her endeavors this winter moving to the west coast to study in Canada and California Thank you guys so much It's been fun