For Meingold Chan, assistant professor in the Purdue University Department of Human Development and Family Science, studying epigenetics can be analogized to playing a piece of sheet music. When conducted or played by a different musician or performed in a different venue, the musical experience can be different, even though the notes themselves stay the same.<\/p>\n
She explained that like that piece of music, the body\u2019s DNA sequence doesn\u2019t change but different chemical markers \u2014 the musician or conductor \u2014 may change how the DNA expresses itself, influencing the behavior or health outcome. Likewise, playing in a small room versus a large arena will further change the experience in the same way sociocultural contexts can change the behavior or health outcome in the human body.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve seen a lot of different analogies for this kind of biology, but this one really speaks to me,\u201d Chan said. \u201cI take a sociocultural perspective to understand children’s social-emotional development, so really thinking about the context they grow up in. Family and culture are two contexts I’m really interested in. Then, epigenetics allows me to answer those questions of the biological embedding of this experience and environment as we grow up \u2014 so how they get under our skin and have a long-term effect on our health and development. Right now, my hope is to bridge the two fields.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":45846,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,19],"tags":[263,1161,1884,2419,240,2420],"class_list":["post-45845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-human-development-and-family-studies","category-research","tag-college-of-health-and-human-sciences","tag-department-of-human-development-and-family-science","tag-epigenetics","tag-meingold-chan","tag-purdue-university","tag-social-emotional-development"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n