The purple gene gets silenced

48:28>> I cross it, I get all green, no purple. It's almost as if the green, whatever it is, has like completely nixed the advantage of the purple gene. >> And silenced it. This is called a paramutation. Okay. >> Fascinating. And it's also it's it's as if there's the new the newly altered silent al that that's there, right? Because I know I have the purple >> al. But that purple al has somehow been silenced. And now that purple al you would assume if it if it made it with another purple al. But this purple al has turned to the dark side somehow and and started mixing all of its other compatriots with the

49:09purple al. >> We call it the Anakin al. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that, right? It's like you've got like a weird corrupted computer file that now goes and infects every other computer. >> And so what this brings up is that there's not this 100% all of the time sort of viewpoint. >> That's the first thing. Yeah. >> Because this should be dominant. >> Yeah. First of all, it's not dominant. But okay, fine. But now it's it's making everything else recessive somehow. It has an ability, >> right? Crossgeneration downstream. It's not just a oneoff outlier. >> Exactly. Yeah. This is very strange. Okay. This was the 1950s. It was a very big deal when when when when it was discovered. Okay. And so now to now we've got a better understanding of what's going on. So in order to

49:50understand this, we've got to understand two things. Okay. First thing is gene regulation. That is the um that is some of the software on top of the genetics. Okay. So we've got two types of gene regulation pathways. You've got enhancers and promoters. We've talked about this a lot on the podcast, right? When you've got a gene, the gene is a recipe for creating a protein. Right? But there is an on button that is telling the machinery to come make the protein and then there is a volume control button that is saying how much protein to make. That is the promoter and the enhancer respectively. The promoter is the on button, the enhancer is the volume control. >> I loved that episode where we talked

50:30about this. >> Yeah, we we we we've talked about this a lot, right? And frequently what happens is the promoter is right next to the gene because like basically what happens is you've got the gene on this part. This is the part that has the recipe. The promoter is right next to it. So, what it's going to do is take something called RNA polymerase, which is the thing that makes it into RNA that then goes into making proteins. The promoter is going to be like, yo, RNA polymerase, come over here, attach to me, and then go this way, and it's going to be like D and goes that way. The enhancer can be way far apart from where the from where the gene is. And the the genetic code can literally fold such that the enhancer gets close to the promoter. the enhancer recruits the RNA polymerase to come and it it's it's very essential for

51:13creating that two-step sort of regulation. >> Yes. >> Right. So this is genetic regulation. That's the first thing we got to understand. Second thing we got to understand is epigenetics. Okay. Epigenetics is the software and the modifying of the structure of DNA and chromatin. Chromatin is the thread that the DNA is right. Um there's two levels