I only have black genes! |
Also known as The Prince of Darkness, Ozzy is a remarkable human specimen. It is no secret that he has constantly struggled with addiction, toured for nearly half a century, bit off the head of a bat, survived reality television, and, on top of all that, has kids. His wife and manager, Sharon, once compared his resilience to that of a cockroach. Ah, love and marriage.
What powerful forces were finally able to put the Prince of Darkness in his place? Wife and kids. |
When scientists sequence a genome, they
basically get to read the DNA of that organism, which is analogous to learning
the ingredients of a recipe. In heavy metal parlance, Ozzy’s genome is the biological
version of “Diary of a Madman”. Doctors, and even Ozzy himself, have long been
bewildered at his continued existence…most people who climb aboard a crazy
train and live the Ozzy lifestyle would have been dead long ago!
Ozzy once considered that he was like a cat
with nine
lives, but there were no feline genes detected in
his genome. In fact, like most scientific results, more questions were raised
than answered. Among some of the more intriguing things spotted in his DNA was a
never-before-seen mutation in his ADH4
gene. ADH4 encodes a protein called alcohol
dehydrogenase 4 that processes alcohol and has been linked to alcohol and
drug dependence. However, we need to learn a lot more
about ADH4 and other metabolic genes if we are to make sense of the results.
Researchers also found traces of Neanderthal
genes in Ozzy’s DNA. However, this probably has nothing to do with his wild
life or ability to howl all night long since a large number of people also
possess Neanderthal DNA. Recent research indicates that ~20% of the Neanderthal
genome still exists in modern humans of non-African ancestry.
So what does all of this tell us and should
we be knocking on Bob Dylan’s door for a DNA sample? Frankly, the data is just
a ‘Blizzard of Ozz’ at the moment. There is no “Ozzy Osbourne” gene, nor
anything concrete that explains why he is who he is. There is nothing that will
be of immediate benefit to substance abusers or help Justin Bieber write better
songs. We still have a lot to learn about the complexities of gene expression
regulation. For example, you can’t make a cake if you only know the ingredients.
We need to know how and when those ingredients are used and in what
proportions. Similarly, we can’t understand Ozzy Osbourne just from a list of
his genes.
Genes are kind of like different musical
instruments, but other factors that are “epigenetic” in nature (epigenetic
meaning “above the gene”) control the level of each instrument, tell it when to
play, or when to rest. Scientists are discovering that many factors from our
environment can influence epigenetic factors, which in turn regulate the amount
of a gene’s activity. Nevertheless, Ozzy’s genome has provided some clues into
what genes we might want to explore further, and that kind of knowledge is
power. The more genomes that are sequenced, the more confidence we can have in
the correlations that arise between gene and phenotype.
For more, check out this TEDMED talk where the
Ozzman and Sharon discuss his genome.
Contributed by: Bill Sullivan
Follow Bill on Twitter: @wjsullivanSankararaman, S., Mallick, S., Dannemann, M., Prüfer, K., Kelso, J., Pääbo, S., Patterson, N., & Reich, D. (2014). The genomic landscape of Neanderthal ancestry in present-day humans Nature, 507 (7492), 354-357 DOI: 10.1038/nature12961
Luo X, Kranzler HR, Zuo L, Lappalainen J, Yang BZ, & Gelernter J (2006). ADH4 gene variation is associated with alcohol dependence and drug dependence in European Americans: results from HWD tests and case-control association studies. Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 31 (5), 1085-95 PMID: 16237392
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