What You Eat Affects Your Genes: RNA from Rice Can Survive Digestion and Alter Gene Expression
[Via 80beats]
RNAs from rice can survive digestion and make their way into mammalian tissues, where they change the expression of genes.
What’s the News: It’s no secret that having lunch messes with your biochemistry. Once that sandwich hits your stomach, genes related to digestion have been activated and are causing the production of the many molecules that help break food down. But a new study suggests that the connection between your food’s biochemistry and your own may be more intimate than we thought. Tiny RNAs usually found plants have been discovered circulating in blood, and animal studies indicate that they are directly manipulating the expression of genes.
What’s the Context:
- MicroRNAs, or miRNAs, are molecules involved in regulation of gene expression, the transcription of genes into proteins. miRNAs bind to the messenger RNAs that ferry genetic information from DNA to the ribosomes, which translate messenger RNAs into proteins.
- When a miRNA binds a messenger RNA, it keeps it from being translated, thus preventing that gene from being expressed.
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MicroRNAs have recently been found all over the place. The fact that they can withstand all sorts of digestive processes is unexpected. The fact that they can also act as a new type of hormone – released by one cell type to affect expression in another – is also just now being appreciated.
Now we find out that the microRNAs from the food we eat can also affect gene expression and our metabolism. So, you could eat exactly the same calories of food but the microRNAs present could alter your metabolism so one set of calories goes to fat while the other goes to muscle energy stores.
Dieting just got a lot more complex. But it explains somewhat how two people could eat the same things but have different outcomes. Their own miRNA background would interact with the incoming miRNAs to create an almost unique response to the food.
