by CHRISTINE GORMAN
Milestones in the effort to eradicate polio [timeline]
PHOTO/http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/multimedia/0512-polio-timeline/images/5578_lores.jpg
Advances in the 1950s and 1960s, including unprecedented cooperation between Soviet and U.S. scientists, allowed polio to be eradicated throughout the Americas by 1994 and all of Europe in 1998. Eliminating the crippling scourge has been more difficult, however, in some parts of Africa and Asia.
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Methylating your muscle DNA
There’s more to your DNA than your DNA. We are now becoming aware of the epigenome. While DNA controls you, your epigenome may help control your DNA, or rather, it can have an extensive impact on how your DNA is expressed. The epigenome consists of changes in the structure of your DNA, how it is packaged, what parts of it are available for expression into RNA and proteins. For example, adding methyls to DNA tends to decrease the gene expression of that DNA segment, while taking away methyl groups increases it. The cool thing about epigenetics is that the methylation can vary from tissue to tissue, controlling how different genes are expressed in say, liver vs spleen.
Scientific American for more