Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith will be talking to a homegrown audience when she addresses the Darwin College Lecture Series on Friday night. As a longstanding Fellow of Darwin, former Head of the Department of Genetics, and until last year the University’s Pro-Vice -Chancellor for Research, she is a familiar face to anyone in Cambridge with even a passing interest in genes.
But Anne’s reputation is far wider than that. A Fellow of the Royal Society, she was named CBE in 2023 for her contribution to research, has served as President of the UK Genetics Society for the past four years, and last summer took up the role of Executive Chair of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.
This year’s Lecture Series theme of Codes is a perfect fit for Anne’s focus on epigenetics or, as her title describes it, ‘a code upon a code’.
“I was delighted that Darwin had the vision of not choosing the genetic code, but choosing another aspect of the genome, that’s of great societal and public interest and which encompasses both exciting biology and some intriguing questions,’’ she says.
The study of epigenetics, the layer of information which sits on top of our heritable DNA and influences our genes, provides compelling further sources of information about cell potential and cell identity. For the Darwin audience, Anne plans to begin from first principles.
“I’ll give a bit of an introduction about the relationship between the genetic code and the epigenetic code – what is it, how is it a code, is it a code in fact, because it’s both stable and dynamic.”
That code is changing our understanding of biology, with a significant potential impact on health, ageing and therapeutic treatments.
“I’ll talk about how a stem cell acquires more epigenetic sophistication as it becomes more of a differentiated cell type. What’s really exciting about that is the way that we can now reprogramme its code turning that specialised cell back into a stem cell in a dish. This then enables the controlled derivation of a range of different cell types which then can be used for therapeutic purposes, for tissue repair and for studying normal development.”
Anne’s own research focus has long been on genomic imprinting; the process that causes genes to be expressed from either the paternally or the maternally inherited chromosome rather than both of them.
“It’s a really remarkable process, because in a single cell, you have a very similar genetic code on the two parental sets of chromosomes, but it can be read differently because the chromosomes inherited from mum carry a different epigenetic code to the chromosomes inherited from dad. And that’s a wonderful story. We don’t really understand why it evolved, but it’s important for our normal growth and development. Genomic imprinting has been a paradigm for understanding the role of epigenetics in controlling genes.”
Finally, Anne will cover a slightly more controversial area.
“People think that the environment talks to the genome via the epigenome. It might in some circumstances, but I think that the evidence is not as encompassing as is believed, actually. It’s very clear that the environment and our genes interact and stuff happens as a consequence. But whether the environment talks to the genome via the epigenome is quite difficult to ascertain.”
Lecture Series audiences are a diverse crowd, attracting both those with a lifelong interest or expertise in a given topic and those starting from the ground floor. But there’s no better guide to the mysteries and excitement of epigenetics than Anne.
“First of all I want to educate a bit, on an important aspect of cutting-edge biology that some people may not have heard about before” she says of her aims for the evening.
“Secondly I want to convey the wonder of this aspect of bioscience. The third aim, which I hope I can get across, is to encourage an appreciation of the value of robust data and the beauty of experimental evidence in pursuit of the truth; this is especially relevant in the field of epigenetics.”
Join us for Anne’s lecture, Epigenetics: A Code upon a Code, at 5.30pm on Friday 14th February.
