Steve Cole: UCLA School of Medicine

Relationships between genes and social behavior have historically been viewed as a one-way street, with genes in control. Recent analyses have challenged this view by discovering broad alterations in the expression of human and macaque genes as a function of differing socio-environmental conditions. My talk summarizes the developing field of primate social genomics, and its efforts to identify the types of genes subject to social regulation, the biological signaling pathways mediating those effects, and the genetic polymorphisms that moderate socio-environmental influences on human gene expression. This approach provides a concrete molecular perspective on how external social environments interact with our genes to shape the functional characteristics of our bodies, and alter our future biological and behavioral trajectories based on our individual transcriptional histories.
http://bec.ucla.edu/posters/Social Regulation of Human Gene Expression – Current Directions 2009.pdfhttp://bec.ucla.edu/posters/Irwin.pdf