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3:24but as with all things in biology, there are always exceptions. And genetics is something that has a bunch of exceptions because you're, you know, down to the molecular level and there's always weird stuff happening. And not everything is about genetics. Meaning not everything is about the hardware of the DNA. It's also about the sort of software which is the epigenetics part of things. This is a very dynamic package. This is how the DNA is wrapped around inside the cell. How much the DNA has access to protein making machinery, things like that. And those things can change much more quickly than the actual genetic sequence
4:06itself. And we're only just starting to get into studying that higher level of genetic machinery, right? And it turns out that that those traits can also be inherited. Like this software package on top of the hardware is something that is also passed down. And we're just starting to understand that. There's exceptions for how it gets passed down. Most of the time, again, it follows Mandelian rules, but sometimes it doesn't. And that's what this story is about. There's a new paper out of John's Hopkins University and Texas A&M that is documenting a new type of non-Mandelian inheritance of epigenetics in mammals. And it's showing that this genetics is
4:47far stranger and far more dynamic and far more interesting than I think Mendel could ever have imagined 160 years ago. And so, like, why why is this a big deal, right? Obviously, anything related to genetics is a big deal because genetics is like the blueprint of life is the blueprint for who we are. But it touches on everything from like why identical twins can have different disease outcomes, right? Identical twins have the same exact DNA DNA, but sometimes one twin is going to have one disease and the other twin is going to be just fine. That's because the software package on top is different, right? Um diseases can skip generations.