Timescales, rapid, acclimation, stress, shock, incremental, tolerance, habituate, fluctuation, temporal, acute, sustain, priming, genome-wide disparity, transition

Key Words

Theory

• Adaptive preference towards gradual shifts in your environment for maintaining a homeostatic epigenome?
• Towards a unified theory of gradual environmental shifts for epigenetic homeostasis.
  • Is there a universal adaptation towards slow change in environments for epigenetic normalacy?

Questions

• Comparative studies looking at gradual shifts in your environment on your epigenome?
  • Comparative studies looking at environmental acclimation on your epigenome?

Research

Significance

• Would suddenly going from one environment to the next w/o an acclimation period put you at a higher risk for dysfunction/disease?
• A sudden or hyper-extreme environment is better suited to long-term bio-engineering?

Environments

Environments w/ a Baseline Above Zero

• Oxygen (Hypoxia ⟷ Normoxia ⟷ Hyperoxia)
• Metabolite Levels (Deficiency ⟷ Optimal ⟷ Toxicity)
  • Vitamin Levels (Deficiency ⟷ Optimal ⟷ Toxicity)
  • Mineral Levels (Deficiency ⟷ Optimal ⟷ Toxicity)
• Particulate Matter (Pollution ⟷ Clean Air ⟷ Purified Air)
• Temperature (Cold ⟷ Thermoneutral ⟷ Warm)
• Food (Starvation ⟷ Adequate ⟷ Abundance)
• Drought
• Salinity

Experiment

• Have a reference epigenome/transcriptome for your model organism.
• Do this all within the same generation.
• Start with two groups (G1, G2) in a normal environment.
• Expose G1 suddenly, but not shockingly, to an atypical environment.
  • Test that groups transcriptome and compare it to reference for severity.
• Expose G2 to the new environment over a gradual period, so they can acclimate.
  • Test that groups transcriptome and compare it to reference for severity.
• Have each group wait 1 week in the atypical environment and recheck the transcriptome.

And it'd be neat to figure out the reverse as well...

• Restore each group to the normal environment suddenly, but not shockingly.
• Re-check the transcriptome of each group and compare it to its atypical state.
• Re-check the transcriptome of each group and compare it previous for duration of restoration.